by Herb Boyd
A bifurcated city experienced another chasm, this one between the black militants and the moderates, who were ascendant, in such organizations as the Wolverine Bar Association, the NAACP, and eventually the DCO, which claimed to represent some thirty organizations and an impressive number of black Detroiters. The DCO quickly commanded the top political leadership in the city. For the most part, this was a familiar division, with the militants expressing separatist tendencies and the other side supporting the integrationist solutions.
New Detroit struggled to find some middle ground, though it leaned toward the CCAC, which soon was uplifted by a check for $85,000 from the Interreligious Foundation for Community Development. Despite this financial support, which allowed the Rev. Cleage to invest in the Black Star Co-op, where African dresses, dashikis, and other garments were produced and sold primarily to African American nationalists, the CCAC failed to gain the traction necessary to overcome attacks “from traditional civil rights groups . . . and to elicit the support of the masses of black Detroiters.”19
Neither the DCO nor the CCAC had the answer to the city’s pressing social and economic problems. None of these makeshift organizations, even when cobbled together as a coalition, could solve the dismal condition of the 24 percent of young black men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who at the time of the rebellion were unemployed. Their resentment was especially sharp because while the bottom economic rung had fallen off the economic ladder, those on the rungs above them were making headway. When Damon Keith was nominated by President Johnson as a federal judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, they were pleased. He was greeted with cheers like those that Geraldine Bledsoe Ford had received one year before, when she was elected to Detroit Recorder’s Court, the first African American woman judge in Michigan. With Judge Wade McCree on the bench in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth District, it seemed that Michigan blacks might finally see some justice. However, there wasn’t much of that for the 678 African Americans arrested during the rebellion; 64 percent of them were charged with looting and faced time in jail or a fine, though most of them had no criminal record. If they were lucky, they ended up in George Crockett’s courtroom where leniency abounded.
Two years after the rebellion, Judge Crockett extended his unique sense of justice once more when he was summoned in the middle of the night and immediately convened a session of his court at police headquarters. A police officer had been shot and killed outside the Rev. Franklin’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where black nationalists, principally members of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), were holding a convention. The police stormed the church and arrested more than 140 activists, holding them incommunicado for hours. Crockett ordered the release of 130 of those arrested, ruling that their detention was in violation of Michigan law. Even William Calahan, the Wayne County prosecutor, had to accede to this ruling. Like Judge Bruce M. Wright in New York City, who earned the nickname Turn-’em-loose Bruce for a similar attitude toward mass arrests and high bail as a tool of suppression, Crockett was hated by the police, so much so that they organized a campaign to impeach him. A bumper sticker said it all—SOCK IT TO CROCKETT! He was denounced by the governor and reprimanded by both houses of the Michigan legislature. But the push for impeachment, which began with the step of bringing Crockett before a Judicial Tenure Commission, backfired when the commission upheld the judge’s position that the blanket arrests were illegal.
If Crockett had opened a fissure in the criminal-justice system, attorney Ken Cockrel drove a wedge into it after he was retained to defend Al Hibbit, who was one of the men accused in the shooting death of Police Officer Ronald Czapski near New Bethel Baptist. Two other RNA members, Chaka Fuller and Rafael Viera, were also arrested and charged. In his defense of Hibbit, Cockrel established himself as one of the brilliant legal minds in the country. He also demonstrated that his courtroom demeanor wasn’t limited to mellifluous colloquy. When his client’s bail was doubled, he called the judge a racist monkey, a honkie dog fool, and a thieving pirate. Cited for contempt of court, he replied that his language was consistent with that spoken about similar subjects in his community. During his own trial, Cockrel was defended by his law partners, and among the witnesses called was Professor Geneva Smitherman, a linguist, whose testimony provided context for Cockrel’s expressive language. Eventually all the charges were dropped, and Cockrel rose to another legal level with his successful defense of Hibbit, mainly by attacking the jury-selection process, asserting that it denied his client a jury of his peers, that is, working-class African Americans. Another jury was impaneled, with a black majority, and Hibbit and the other defendants were exonerated.
Cockrel and his law partner Justin Ravitz, used a similar call for a jury of peers in defense of James Johnson, a factory worker, who was accused of killing three fellow workers. Again, Cockrel got the jury he wanted, jurors with work experience in factories. Johnson was presented as a man with deep psychological problems stemming from the time in his childhood when he witnessed the dismembered body of his cousin after he was lynched by a white mob. Later, during the trial, Cockrel took the jurors on a tour of the plant so they could see for themselves how dangerous Johnson’s job was. This was the coup de grace that freed Johnson. Cockrel argued that the oppressive work conditions led to Johnson’s mental breakdown. Not long afterward, Cockrel’s legal finesse would once again command media attention.
The crack in the criminal-justice system applied by Crockett and widened by Cockrel had been long in the making. Both men were important in the evolution of Detroit’s radical period that came in the wake of several key developments in 1968, a memorable year for the world and the city. On a global scale, the war in Vietnam occupied most of the headlines, and even more so the often violent confrontations with those who opposed it. The Tet Offensive by the Viet Cong at the start of the year ignited a wave of protests throughout Europe, most dramatically in Paris. There were the assassinations of Dr. King in April and Robert Kennedy two months later. King’s death triggered riots throughout the nation. On April 4, 1968, everything changed, said Ron Lockett, executive director of the Northwest Activities Center, who at that time was a student at Eastern High School and a Black Power advocate. “We took over the school,” he remembered. “Two students climbed the flagpole and took down the Stars and Stripes. Our protest was so strong that when we came to school after the break the name of the school had been changed to Martin Luther King, Jr. High School.”20 Adding to the yearlong turbulence was the police violence at the Democratic National Convention that August in Chicago. It was against this grim backdrop that a convergence of student activism, wildcat strikes by black workers, and the founding of grassroots organizations gave Detroit the leading role on the nation’s black political stage. At the forefront of this energized base of reinvigorated activism were the students at Wayne State University, including Ron Lockett, Ron Hunt, Victor Stewart, Glenn Shelton, Lonnie Peek, Gene Cunningham, Sylvia Williams, Geoffrey Jacques, Homer Fox, Alice Tait, Arthur Bowman, Reggie Carter, Kathy Gamble, and Ozell Bonds.
“In the autumn of 1968,” wrote Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin in their thorough discussion of the era, “Wayne State University had almost 35,000 students. Most of them lived at home and most of them worked.”21 The university, composed of eleven colleges, including the highly nonconformist, politicized cadre of students at Monteith College, was basically a commuter school with few students living in the few dormitories. Most of the students were white. Although the black students, numbering between 2,500 and 3,500, at this urban university, located in the middle of an African American community, represented 10 percent of the student population on campus—a percentage much higher than at the University of Michigan and Michigan State—it was still minuscule compared to the percentage of blacks in the surrounding population, and while these students were admitted, too many of them did not graduate.
The Daily Collegian, the student newspaper, was a lily-white operation with little social or
political relevance for the black students. Nor were conditions any better in the classroom, where a narrow Eurocentric curriculum was being taught. “We were a tiny minority in the classrooms and virtually forgotten when it came to seeing our history and culture represented in the syllabus,” said Gene Cunningham, who would succeed John Watson as the editor of the South End, the renamed Daily Collegian.22 The long, hot summer of ’67 had to some degree emboldened the black students that fall when they returned to classes. By the fall of ’68, their outlook and determination gained more traction—and more students. With this new sense of power and President William Keast and his administration on the ropes, fearful of having disorders on Wayne’s campus like those that had been developing elsewhere since the spring, they organized themselves and began to issue a number of demands, including an increase in black student enrollment, a black students’ union, and the creation of a Black Studies department. These demands were eagerly promoted in the newly revamped, radicalized South End under the direction of Watson, who was ably assisted by his white managing editor, the intrepid Nick Medvecky, an ex-paratrooper and veteran political activist.23 With Watson, his hair uncombed for months and his glasses held together by a wad of white tape, and the skinny Medvecky at the wheel, the South End maintained a vital link to grassroots organizations, such as the local branch of the Black Panther Party, and to the growing army of young blacks in the city’s plants, especially at Dodge Main in Hamtramck. Main was a bubbling cauldron of protest about work conditions and dissatisfaction with the UAW, which, during the most heated exchanges with black workers, was said to stand for “U Ain’t White.” In effect, the struggle taking place on campus mirrored the uprising in the plants, and there would soon come a time when the students and workers would be one and the same, despite the South End banner that declared ONE CLASS CONSCIOUS WORKER IS WORTH 100 STUDENTS! An effective bridge between the students and the militant workers was the Inner City Voice, where Watson had sharpened his ideological perspective and journalistic skills before arriving at the South End. For a while they coexisted, sometimes sharing stories just as they shared a revolutionary objective.
As the students and several radical professors began their negotiations with President Keast, his shock of gray hair and tailored suits embellishing his New England demeanor, and Arthur Johnson, then a vice president of community affairs, it was agreed that an Association of Black Students would be formed with Lonnie Peek as the chair. Meanwhile, plans were under way to establish a black studies program, with the students to be given a considerable voice in its planning, staff, and faculty.
19
OUR THING IS DRUM!
Concomitant with the upsurge of radical developments on campus, workers in the plants had pushed ahead with the formation of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement or DRUM. The radical labor tradition imbued in the white union movement finally, on May 2, 1968, connected with black workers. It would have been perfectly apropos if blues singer Joe L. Carter had rendered lines from “Please Mr. Foreman” when some four thousand black and white workers at Dodge Main staged a wildcat strike together, protesting a speedup on the assembly line. “Please, Mr. Foreman, slow down this assembly line,” Carter sang, “I don’t mind workin’ but I do mind dying.” The refrain from the Chrysler bosses was not blue but pink as a disproportionate number of black workers were fired, including General Gordon Baker Jr. In a letter to Chrysler Corporation three days after his dismissal, Baker refused to allow his discharge to go unanswered. “Even though you have falsely placed the banner of leadership of a wildcat strike upon my shoulders I shall wear it proudly,” he wrote. “For what more noble banner could a black working man bear? In this day and age under the brutal oppression reaped from the backs of black workers, the leadership of a wildcat strike is a badge of honor and courage.”1 Rather than ridding itself of a nuisance and silencing Baker’s powerful voice, the company inadvertently gave him a larger forum and a leadership position that would be a driving force in the various iterations of the Revolutionary Union Movement.
In the beginning was DRUM, and among its sixteen demands were an end to racism in the UAW, revision of the grievance procedure, elimination of all safety and health hazards in the auto industry, and a more vigorous fight by the union against production-line speedups and ever increasing output quotas. “The companies should double the size of their work force to meet the present workload.”2 In July, DRUM called for another strike at Dodge Main, and more than three thousand black workers stayed home for two days. The strike gave the organization the publicity it needed to spark the formation of other rallies and strikes. Suddenly, there was CADRUM (GM’s Cadillac plant), FRUM (Ford), ELRUM (Chrysler Eldon Avenue plant), and even an UPRUM, a UPS contingent. There was such a rash of strikes and spinoffs from DRUM that an umbrella group was forged—the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW). “My role as one of the founders was to see that League policies were implemented and to hold it all together with all the personalities and egos,” recalled Michael Hamlin.3 The other founding members of the league, who composed the Executive Committee, were General Baker, Ken Cockrel, John Watson, Luke Tripp, John Williams, and Chuck Wooten. In June 1969, the league was incorporated, and four months later, it opened its headquarters at 179 Cortland in Highland Park. It was off to a promising start, accelerated by ancillary movements from students and white radicals, including Sheila Murphy, Jack Russell, Joann Castle, John and Leni Sinclair, Ron Glotta, and Frank Joyce. Hamlin had his hands full trying to harmonize the differing tendencies and ameliorate the frictions within the ever expanding League. As it is for any mass-based organization, it was impossible to control the flow of folks who congregated at headquarters or showed up at the various rallies and demonstrations. Each member of the Executive Committee, for example, was under extreme pressure—hounded by external problems from Chrysler with its subpoenas and the police with their harassment, and internally by the inability to detect or prevent infiltration by agents provocateurs from law enforcement agencies. Then there were the personal fights and bickering, the blatant male chauvinism, the abuse and attacks on women, and the antagonistic behavior of black members toward any whites, however well meaning, who dared step into headquarters. “We had instances of rape, the impregnation of a sixteen year old honor student who had joined our youth arm and so forth,” Hamlin lamented. “So you could imagine the opportunities that gave official law enforcement to come down on us, on top of the internal demoralization this caused. And I couldn’t be there all the time to keep order among these elements.”4
For a while these internal contradictions were minimal and didn’t hamper the league’s growth, which extended all the way to Italy, where its strategies and tactics were admired and appropriated by Italian workers. “Outwardly,” wrote Ernie Allen (Mkalimoto) who joined the league in 1970 and served as its director of political education, “the League operation was extremely impressive. Even those with prior political experience could not help but be moved by the seriousness, dedication, and camaraderie of League members who followed impossible schedules to get the job done.”5 Interestingly, in a city crowded with an amalgam of differing organizations, the league maintained a relatively harmonious relationship with them. “We existed side by side with the Black Panthers and other organizations in the black community like the RNA [Republic of New Afrika],” General Baker told Bob Mast. “We pretty much dominated the politics in Detroit.”6 That “domination” had more to do with the power of the personalities at the top of the league than with the size of the organization, which never exceeded more than a hundred active, ready-for-the-ramparts members.
In addition, as Allen notes in his thoroughgoing analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the league, it was succumbing to a “false sense of organizational success in other areas: the creation of the League film ‘Finally Got the News,’ the proliferation of LRBW offices in the Detroit area, participation in a book project which had engaged hundreds of liberal whites, as well as growin
g media attention which the League was attracting nationwide.”7 Another illusion of success arrived with the money James Forman had collected from the Black Manifesto. No longer affiliated with the Black Panther Party and only marginally connected to SNCC, Forman was content to rest on the laurels he had earned as a leader in the civil and human rights struggle. What beckoned him to Detroit was a phone call from Mike Hamlin and the National Black Economic Development conference, led by the eminent minister Lucius Walker, to be held at Wayne State University under the auspices of the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO). Forman was invited to speak at the conference by Dorothy Dewberry, a colleague of his from SNCC. Simultaneously, an invitation was extended by Hamlin to him to observe the inner workings of the league. Meeting with Hamlin and league members was a priority for Forman, but after several sessions with them, it was decided that the conference, (later known as BEDC), could be a useful event to attend in order to seek funding to finance some of the league’s objectives. “Since the conference was being staged by ‘Christians,’” Forman wrote, “we felt it was the right occasion to demand reparations from the Christian churches for the centuries of exploitation and oppression which they had inflicted on black people around the world.”8
On April 26, 1969, about the same time that the league was in the early stages of consolidation at the conference, Forman delivered his Manifesto. A week later in New York City at Riverside Church, he delivered the same address, which received far more notice and notoriety there. After a lengthy discourse on racism and exploitation, and how black workers helped to build the most industrialized nation in the world, Forman cut to the chase. “We are therefore demanding of the white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism, that they begin to pay reparations to black people in this country,” Forman recited. “We are demanding $500,000,000 . . . this total comes to 15 dollars per nigger.”9