Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  According to the Manifesto, the money would be earmarked for television stations and publishing houses in four cities with only Detroit mentioned in both categories; a southern land bank; a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund; and an International Black Appeal, among other initiatives. The Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), headed by the Rev. Lucius Walker, was designated to distribute the funds in accordance with the mandate. The Manifesto was signed by a number of well-known Detroiters, who constituted a steering committee, including league members Luke Tripp, John Watson, John Williams, Ken Cockrel, Chuck Wooten, and Mike Hamlin. Other notables were Daniel Aldridge, Howard Fuller (Owusu Sadaukai), Julian Bond, Vincent Harding, Lucius Walker, Peter Bernard, Howard Moore, and Renny Freeman of New Detroit. Fannie Lou Hamer was the only woman listed.

  Somewhere along the way, things fell apart. Forman announced, “Many forms of support that we thought would be forthcoming failed to materialize. Key to this was the retreat of IFCO from support of the Black Manifesto.”10 The actual amount of money funneled to the League by BEDC remains a mystery, though whatever funds were obtained were more than the organization had on hand, and the creation of Black Star Publishing was a major recipient of the funds. Some of the money was invested in the film, Finally Got the News, that was to promote the League, which it did with a modicum of success. A larger sum was piped into the publishing company overseen by a white printer, Fredy Perlman. A black woman, Helen Jones, was in charge of the day-to-day operation, and assisted by former SNCC member Monroe Sharp who had returned to the states from Tanzania to work with the League. Other than posters, placards, flyers, and pamphlets, the most costly endeavor was the printing of Forman’s book The Political Thought of James Forman that was not enthusiastically received by the rank and file members. Many of those who criticized the book had not read it, basing their responses on others’ opinions. Those critics reported that it was a waste of time and money, and that Forman’s ideas at that time were imprecise with no clear direction nor analysis.

  When assessing the positive and negative aspects of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the valiant efforts of the workers and students should not be minimized. It would be disingenuous to ignore the organization’s faults—its structural problems, the tension created by its varied social and political composition, the recurring disconnect between the leadership and the rank and file, and the trouble that arose from the Black Manifesto and its bounty of funds—even though it provided the league with temporary funding that freed members from soliciting and helped generate longer-term financial support. These issues came to a head by 1971 with the “Easter Purges.” The league’s Executive Board voted unanimously to expel seven members, charging them with insubordination and alleging that their spouses were “security risks.” “Principled criticisms of the organization, as well as measures designed to address its fundamental problems, had been offered; the only ‘counter’ which the EB [Executive Board] could find in its political repertoire was that of ‘hardline policy,’” wrote Ernie Allen, one of the seven purged. “The effects of that policy on the rank-and-file as well as on the EB itself constituted the immediate causes leading to the break-up of LRBW.”11 Complicating matters was the presence of white women, the wives of Mike Hamlin and Ken Cockrel, which didn’t please the black women in the organization. There may have been a special dispensation for Jane Fonda, who moved to Detroit in 1971 to participate in the Winter Soldier investigation, in which Vietnam veterans were asked to testify about the atrocities they experienced. Fonda was introduced to Cockrel, learned of the league and its mission, and expressed an interest in working to help them. Nick Medvecky, who was John Watson’s managing editor during his tenure at the South End, recalled a trip that he, Watson, and Cockrel made to San Francisco in 1972, which must have occurred after the series of letters between Cockrel and Fonda. During that trip, Fonda and Donald Sutherland were shooting Steelyard Blues, Medvecky wrote. “Jane and others passed us onto a variety of left contacts in or associated to that industry.”12

  According to Patricia Bosworth, Cockrel told Fonda, “There is no one in the movement, no real activist, who’s a movie star. Stay with it, we need you. Own your leadership.”13 They held each other in high regard as indicated in letters between them. Fonda had received a film treatment from Cockrel on the subject of drugs, but she told him that her friend actor Donald Sutherland had found it “unprofessional.” Still, she was interested in knowing more about the Black Workers Congress (BWC). In his reply, Cockrel expressed his excitement in hearing from her, and though he was disappointed about the assessment of the treatment, he must have been thrilled to see Fonda’s political references to Cheddi Jagan of Guyana. He explained to her the “many internal changes” that had occurred within the BWC and “as for the film project, your assessment is absolutely correct, but that situation is no longer of any import, at least not in the context of Black Star Productions. Moreover, I regret that I was in such situation with the shit being so ‘untogether.’”14

  The collapse of the league, in the eyes of General Baker, was mainly the result of trying to do too many things and losing focus on organizing in the plants. “We had Black Star Productions, Black Star Printing, two Black Star bookstores, Black Conscious Library, and all these other facilities we had gathered around us,” he recalled. “In the split we lost our intellectual wing that we relied heavily on to be our spokesmen . . . we went on a kind of retreat. We had to.”15

  Call it a retreat, a strategic withdrawal, or just another path away from the “hard line” for some of the key players in the league. While Baker maintained his ties to the workers, Watson raised dogs, Cockrel geared up for a successful run for City Council, Hamlin and his closest comrades formed the Black Workers Congress, and Forman went back to school and did some union organizing in the nation’s capital. In the wake of their departure, there were only the remnants of their Camelot-like moment when a generation was convinced that the revolution was just around a corner in Detroit and elsewhere, when there was hope that a Black United Front would be the answer to the stultifying retrenchment. There were a number of accomplishments the league could document as part of its legacy, including its impact on the UAW’s racist policies and the promotion of African Americans to leadership posts. It instilled in the youth a more class-conscious outlook and a new appreciation of working-class culture. And by its endeavor and experience, it highlighted mistakes to be avoided in the future.

  20

  UNDER DURESS FROM STRESS

  As the sun was setting in 1971 for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, it was rising in several sections of Detroit’s social, political, and economic firmament. Things were looking promising for Motown with the release of Marvin Gaye’s breakthrough recording “What’s Going On.” And African Americans were making some headway in the upper echelons of the big three—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—as well as automobile dealers. If the league was in a political retreat, Gaye, his emotional state always an issue, was looking for a refuge from the public after the death of his singing partner, Tammi Terrell, which rocked his musical future. When he proposed his concept album What’s Going On as the solution to societal problems and his own troubled condition, Gordy and his management team resisted. They said the songs were too long, too formless, and would find no appeal or traction with listeners, even his most devoted fans. Gaye told them that either they’d release the album, or he’d never record for them again. “The ploy worked,” wrote his biographer David Ritz. “Marvin won, and the winnings were bigger than even he had imagined. His first self-produced, self-written album altered not only his career but his very life.”1 The album’s narrative, Gaye’s antiwar message, and his plea for peace both in the world and his troubled life were all the therapy he needed to recapture his musical genius, to reclaim his place among the best soul singers and composers of his generation. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and others had provided the funky wedge, but Gaye supp
lied the passionate cry, the urgency that gives his music an eternal presence.

  Whatever the revolutionary content of the Motown sound, it meant little to the machinations of the Detroit Police Department. There was a foreboding uptick in police violence with the creation of a secret unit in the city’s police department, the dreaded death squad STRESS, an acronym for Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets. This undercover decoy squad was fully mobilized and operating with alarming and frightening effect. Each evening extended the pattern of ever more disturbing assaults on the black community, particularly its young men. Mayor Roman Gribbs, an ex-sheriff of Wayne County, who had defeated black candidate Richard Austin in 1969, and Police Chief John Nichols were determined to reduce crime in the city by brute force, even if it meant reducing the black population. During STRESS’s first year as a death squad–cum–SWAT team, the city’s police force had the highest number of civilian killings per capita of any American police department.2 During its three and a half years of existence, STRESS officers shot and killed 24 men, 22 of them African American. So Gaye’s question was never more apt. In effect, one third of the homicides were committed by STRESS, which represented only 2 percent of the total department. To justify these numbers, which included the body counts of more than five hundred raids without search warrants, the unit’s commander, James Barron, cited the dangers the cops encountered when invading people’s homes. Among the STRESS officers, none was as seemingly problematic as crew chief Raymond Peterson. Before he was assigned to STRESS, he had amassed a record number of complaints. During his first two years on the squad, he took part in nine killings and three nonfatal shootings.3 Bullets from Peterson’s gun killed five of the victims. No charges were brought in any of these cases. Two years later, in 1973, criminal charges were brought against him after he shot and killed a man—in self-defense, he claimed. But the knife recovered at the scene belonged to Peterson. Peterson was acquitted of the charge, but he was dismissed from the police force after the trial. In 2012, the name Raymond Peterson appears in Unity, a quarterly published on behalf of retired police officers and firemen, praising the publication and submitting a donation.4

  On at least one occasion, the STRESS unit wasn’t content to be gunning down black citizens. STRESS officers were cruising down Rochester Street on the west side on March 9, 1972, when they observed a man carrying a gun enter an apartment building. They were not aware that the man was an off-duty Wayne County deputy sheriff on his way to a card game with fellow officers. Thinking they had stumbled upon an illegal gambling establishment, the officers barged through a door that was left partly ajar. The deputies thought the intruders were there to rob them and opened fire. According to tenants in the building, some thirty shots were fired. One of the bullets struck Deputy Henry Henderson, forty, who died an hour later at Detroit General Hospital. Four other deputies were wounded, but none of them seriously.

  Detroit police commissioner John F. Nichols and Wayne County sheriff William Lucas, the first black to hold the post, took charge of the investigation. They told the press the shoot-out resulted from a tragic misunderstanding. “This could have happened to any police unit,” Nichols said, “and it could have turned out the same way.”5

  Anti-STRESS feelings reached their peak on December 4, 1972, when four undercover cops engaged in a shoot-out with John Percy Boyd, Hayward Brown, and Mark Bethune. They were basically concerned with the eradication of heroin in the black community, an issue of serious concern that the law enforcement agencies were giving no serious attention. “Johnny, Hayward, and Ibo [Bethune] were at my house when they planned to take the drug dealers out,” said poet/musician Sadiq Bey. “They were determined to rid the community of the heroin dealers.”6 If the officers were there on a stakeout, their attention was soon riveted on the three armed young men, and in the exchange of gunfire, four of the STRESS officers were wounded.

  This prompted a strong reaction from the Detroit Police Department. Almost immediately, the police began conducting one of the largest manhunts in the city’s history. Practically everyone associated with the three, especially their family members, were targeted, harassed, and had the doors to their homes kicked in. Most egregious were the police assaults on the families of John Boyd and his first cousin, Hayward Brown. One evening when John Clore, Boyd’s stepbrother, returned to his home, it had been ransacked. He then went to the home of his parents, Dorothy and Siegel Clore on Charest on the city’s east side. About two hours later, without warning or a search warrant, five uniformed police officers crashed through the front door, barging in with their rifles pointed at the family members. Behind them came ten more officers, and while some held the family at gunpoint, the others searched the house and seized two unloaded hunting rifles and shotguns owned by Siegel Clore. According to the lawsuit filed by Dorothy Clore, her son was forced to lie on the floor handcuffed while he was searched. Subsequently, he, his girlfriend, and his stepsister, Melba Boyd, were arrested and held for several hours without being charged. “The suit said that later the same night Siegel Clore received a telephone call from a man who identified himself as a Detroit police officer and threatened to blow up the Clore home.”7 Hayward Brown’s family was also targeted and harassed when the home belonging to his mother, Odessa Brown, was raided and searched without a warrant.

  The illegal procedures against the Clores and the Browns were among the fifty to one hundred complaints and documented cases brought against the police department. Durwood Furshee, a fifty-seven-year-old unemployed security guard, would also have been a complainant had he not died of police gunfire after they stormed his home on December 8. Believing they were a gang of robbers breaking into his house, he opened fire and was killed in a barrage of bullets from the STRESS officers.

  Three weeks later, on December 27, another shoot-out with Boyd, Brown, and Bethune occurred, and this time one officer, Robert Bradford, was killed, and another, Robert Dooley, was wounded. Some accounts mistake who was killed and who was wounded, but as Patrolman Doug Heady later recalled the incident, upon receiving a radio run that day that announced that two persons in front of 9234 Schaffer, possibly police officers, had been shot, “My partner Bob Walden and myself were the first car there. Bob Dooley was lying in the street by their car . . . he had been shot several times. Bob Bradford was lying face down in the driveway, and had been shot several times . . . Bob Bradford died in my arms that night.”8 Officer Dooley informed the police who the assailants were, and a massive alert went out for their arrest. Later, that evening, Police Commissioner Nichols appeared on television and described the three as “mad-dog killers.” After weeks of holding the black community hostage, the police announced in January 1973 that Brown had been captured and beaten severely when they brought him to the precinct. Meanwhile, it was widely reported that Boyd and Bethune had eluded the police and, disguised as a priest and nun, escaped to Atlanta.

  While Brown was awaiting trial, Boyd was killed by a police officer on February 23, along with his half-brother, Owen Winfield. Four days later, on the rooftop of Morris Brown College, Bethune was shot and wounded by the police, and then reportedly took his own life.

  Retained to defend Brown, Cockrel sprang into action. In typical fashion, he flipped the script. Instead of Brown on trial, it was STRESS. After a series of trials on more than a dozen charges, Brown was acquitted. When the verdict was announced, the courtroom was seized with bedlam as spectators cheered and raised their fists in triumph. Brown’s acquittal meant that his dead partners were also technically freed, little consolation for the Boyd and Brown families. They could take pride in the fact that the three were instrumental in derailing STRESS and what may have been their overall plan to allow the drugs to flow thereby creating a multitude of craving addicts to prey on their neighbors and families.9

  Cockrel’s victorious court battles, from New Bethel to Brown, made him a highly regarded public figure, one who, if he played his cards right, could one day become mayor, although that o
ption would have to be delayed a few years. The politically savvy Coleman Young was gathering his campaign forces to challenge Nichols and to make certain that STRESS, having left 22 fatalities in its murderous wake, all but one an African American, by any other name would never again run rampant, arresting and harassing innocent citizens. About the same time that Brown was celebrating his liberation, Young was ready for a serious mayoral bid, though Richard Austin was being touted as the odds-on favorite to be the city’s first African American mayor, if he chose to relinquish his post as Michigan’s first black secretary of state. He chose not to run. This left Young with the opening he needed, but there was still the formidable John Nichols. When the primaries were over, Young had come in second, so in Detroit’s nonpartisan mayoral system, the two were set to go head-to-head, and the issue of the police and its poor relations with the black community was a point Young drove home during his campaign.

  The election came down to race—a black man versus a white man; one labeled anti-cop for opposing police lawlessness, the other epitomizing the city’s police. There was no gray area between Coleman Young and John Nichols, only black against blue. Councilman Mel Ravitz, no relationship to Cockrel’s law partner, Justin Ravitz, was another candidate, who with UAW backing could not be taken lightly. But after a dismal showing in the primary, Ravitz stepped aside, and the union had no other choice but Young. “On election day, I became the goddamn mayor of Detroit,” Young said in his typically colorful language. “There wasn’t a single precinct in the city that was close—Nichols took the white ones and I took the black ones—but the final count fell within four percent, with 234,000 votes for me and 216,000 for the commissioner. To top it off, my victory was accompanied by that of my running mate, the new city charter.”10 Young wasn’t naive about his victory, feeling that the city was his because the whites no longer wanted it. He relished the opportunity, even if he had been given an empty bag. Diana Ross, topping the charts with “Touch Me in the Morning,” sang his praises at Cobo Hall, and the party was on—that is, until he delivered his acceptance speech. He told all the dope pushers, rip-off artists, and muggers that it was “time to leave Detroit. Hit Eight Mile Road. I don’t give a damn if you’re black or white, or they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.”11