Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  This was the beginning of Young’s mandate, which would be relentless for the next twenty years. His strong language about getting out of Dodge, that a new marshal was in town, was questionable, since white flight had been under way for more than a decade. It was noteworthy that Detroit had its first black mayor and the City Council had its first black female member, Erma Henderson. Winning a council seat, even an unprecedented one—and later becoming its first black president for twelve years—was almost routine for Henderson, since she had learned so much about the process as a campaign manager in William Patrick’s successful race in 1957. Most useful for Patrick was Henderson’s long and deep relationship to Detroit’s black community, which began in 1918, when she arrived with her parents from Pensacola, Florida. She was a product of the city’s public schools, a student leader at Eastern High School, and a graduate of Wayne State University, from which she later earned a master’s degree in social work. As a social worker, she expanded her already impressive contacts, which would be crucial in her endeavors as a public servant. The new black mayor and councilwoman had been friends since childhood.12

  As the political glass ceiling was cracking, blacks were also making their way into the city’s corporate hierarchy. In January 1971, the bold and charismatic Philadelphian Leon Sullivan, having flexed his innovation muscles in the realm of employment and civil rights, was named the first African American on General Motors’s board of directors. A year later, Jerome “Brud” Holland, who had distinguished himself in many endeavors, including serving as ambassador to Sweden during the Nixon administration, joined the board at Chrysler. In 1973 Clifton Wharton, the president of Michigan State University, was elected as Ford’s first black board member. At this time, the small group of African American automobile dealers included Ed Davis, the nation’s first black car dealer, with a Chrysler-Plymouth dealership on Dexter Avenue; Clarence Carter, GM’s first black car dealer in Detroit; and Nathan Conyers, the brother of Rep. John Conyers, with his Ford dealership on Fourteenth Street and West Grand Boulevard. They were hoping those appointments would improve sales and provide the help that they needed to prevent more black dealerships from closing their doors. One plan to prevent the failures was the formation of the National Black Automobile Dealers Association. Robert Hill, owner of one of the first black dealerships in the West, in Compton, California, became executive director. Hill quickly sought funding from the Commerce Department to get the organization functioning, but it was too late to salvage Davis, the pioneer, who shuttered his operation in 1971. Davis, like the other dealers, began to realize that blacks don’t necessarily buy from black dealers. The dealerships owned by whites were not doing that well either. Moreover, there were the challenges of black customers qualifying for credit and the limited number of “marginal risks” allowed a dealership. “The consumer had to have confidence in the merchant, which meant the merchant must establish credibility,” said Hill. “My credibility is affected when I can’t get the customer financing and another dealer can. It’s affected when I can’t service his car and the other guy can. The consumer responds to that, whether he’s black or white.”13 There were sundry other bumps in the road for black dealerships—management deficiencies, financing, and location—but when Davis closed shop, Hill may have known that the handwriting was on the wall.

  By the time Young celebrated his first year in office, STRESS was gone, and so was Motown, which in 1972 ceased operations in the city and moved to Los Angeles. With the city and the nation reeling from an economic downturn, Berry Gordy was among the city’s entrepreneurs who began to consider other venues and ventures for his investments and aspirations. Such an option was not available for the city’s leader. The Roman Gribbs administration had left Young with a financial crisis that could only be solved by trimming the staff and cutting spending, which he did surgically. Young took control of the city at the lowest ebb of automobile production since 1950. He was hardly sworn in when the oil embargo kicked in, and this only added salt to an economic wound created with the announcement that American Motors was packing it in and bound for Southfield.14 For Young, an additional woe was a reluctant populace who refused to support his appeal to legalize gambling. (In 1996, two years after a casino opened in Canada, the mayor’s dream of casinos in Detroit finally became a reality after the City Council approved the proposal.) However, Young was able to appropriate $35 million from the state by emphasizing the importance of the city’s major institutions—the Detroit Zoo, the Detroit Public Library, and the Detroit Institute of Arts—that were visited and enjoyed by residents of the entire state.15

  21

  MUSES AND MUSIC

  The city’s major cultural institutions received a cash infusion, but the lesser known community-based organizations had to seek other means of financial support. Their directors and board members knew that it was futile to expect any trickle-down funding from Young’s windfall from the state. Many of them survived by charging admission and soliciting donations, much as Boone House had done in the past. Boone House, which flourished in the early sixties, was the brainchild of the Rev. Theodore Sylvester Boone, for many years the pastor at the historic King Solomon Baptist Church on Fourteenth Street. Born in Texas, Boone attended college in Iowa and later earned his law degree in Chicago. Before he left Texas for Detroit in 1941, he was arguably the most prolific black writer in the state, having authored fifteen books, including one on the philosophy of Booker T. Washington. Over the next decade, he wrote twelve more. When he was approached by a coterie of Detroit writers to use his parish as a meeting place, they obviously knew of his devotion to the craft.

  Boone House, despite the indefatigable efforts of poet Margaret Danner, existed for only a couple of years, from 1962 to 1964. Still, it was the inspiration for a number of writers, none more significant than Dudley Randall. A native of Washington, DC, Randall moved to Detroit in 1920. He was thirteen when he published his first poem in the Detroit Free Press.1 After military service in World War II, Randall worked in the post office while earning a degree in library science. For the next five years, he was a college librarian at Morgan State and Lincoln University in Missouri. In 1956, he returned to Detroit and was employed at the Wayne County Federated Library System. To protect the rights to his poem “Ballad of Birmingham,” about the four little black girls killed in a church bombing in 1963, Randall published it himself. Out of this necessity, Broadside Press was born.

  Broadside Press was much more than a local phenomenon; it had international impact. Melba Joyce Boyd, an editor, noted that between 1966 and 1975, the press published “eighty-one books, seventy-four of which were poetry, including single collections by forty poets, and of those forty, fifteen authored two or even three titles.”2 Randall may not have been aware that J. Edgar Hoover’s agents had alerted him about the press after the publication of For Malcolm, an anthology dedicated to the slain leader.3 Broadside Press was a prodigious undertaking during this era when black studies and the arts were being revived.

  In 1975, near the end of its productive run, Broadside published Sterling Brown’s The Last Ride of Wild Bill. During a visit to Detroit, the esteemed scholar, poet, and raconteur shared the poem and a few of his tall tales with an audience at Your Heritage House, founded by Josephine Harreld Love in 1969. They were enthralled by his voice, its melodic cadence, the dramatic interpretation of his characters. A year later, the staff at the press were among those joyful readers to learn that one of their own, Robert Hayden, who once lived in Black Bottom, was named the first African American poet laureate of the United States. Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays” offers his memory of his father during those days in Paradise Valley, an extension of Black Bottom, in which he observed his father’s early rising and hard work with “cracked hands that ached.”

  Although Hayden was respected by Randall, many of the poets and writers during the intense period of black nationalism in the late 1960s took exception to his work, dismissing it as irrelevant to
the black arts movement. In 1966, at a Black Writers Conference at Fisk University, when Hayden announced that he was not a “Negro” or “black” poet, but simply a poet, he incurred the animus of many black artists, including Haki Madhubuti.4 When Madhubuti—under his birth name, Don L. Lee, also a Broadside poet—wrote his critique of Hayden, he questioned Hayden’s editorship of a Negro anthology, given his resistance to being labeled a Negro poet: “If one doesn’t wish to be judged or recognized as a ‘Negro’ poet, why advertise as such?”5

  Madhubuti may have denounced Hayden in the 1960s but he still studied his works, including him among other influences, such as Hoyt Fuller, Frantz Fanon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, et al. He said they confirmed that any “people who control and define their own cultural and political imperatives . . . should be about the healthy replication of themselves and the world they walk in.”6

  In 1967, when Madhubuti created Third World Press, he stated that it was a direct outgrowth of Broadside Press. Early on, he expressed in action what he later meant by a “healthy replication of ourselves” by following in the footprints left by his mentor. “I am the man I am today in part because of Dudley Randall,” he told Detroit News reporter Betty DeRamus. “I . . . stayed in his house. He taught me what was possible.”7

  Five years after Madhubuti launched his press, Naomi Long Madgett, a Detroit poet, founded Lotus Press. Madgett arrived in Detroit from Virginia, a well-traveled path, eventually earning a master’s degree in English from Wayne State University. She was a member of a group of writers, including Oliver LaGrone, James Thompson, Margaret Danner, and Randall, who met at Boone House. When she began Lotus Press, she claimed it was out frustration with both “white publishers” and rigid, even opportunistic, nationalist independent black presses.8 Undoubtedly, Broadside Press was not included in this denunciation, because Madgett’s admiration for Randall was expressed on many occasions. “He was my friend and colleague in the community of poets who flourished during the 1950s and 1960s in Detroit,” she told a reporter.9 By the twenty-first century, Broadside and Lotus were united under the same ownership.

  Publishing black books in Detroit, other than Broadside and Lotus, was never a thriving business. Except for Vaughn’s, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, and a few operated by churches, black-owned bookstores were nonexistent. In the turbulent 1960s, Vaughn’s on the far west side and the Shrine on Linwood were where Broadside and Lotus Press publications could be found. The stores were bountiful with books chronicling the movement and African American history and culture, as well as other Afrocentric artifacts popular during the period.

  “I bought my first copy of Malcolm X’s autobiography from Vaughn’s,” said Ron Hunter. “It was also a place where you could get the latest pamphlets on the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or the anti-colonial wars in other parts of the continent.” Besides offering books, magazines, journals, and African artifacts, Vaughn’s, like the Shrine, was a meeting place that hosted authors and their signings and served as a center for organizations to conduct workshops and lectures.

  Sometimes literary and musical events were joined at such locations as Club Ibo in the north of the city or at the Detroit Creative Musicians Association on East Ferry near Wayne State University, another place where artists could gather and express their creative ingenuity. Don Davis’s United Sound Systems extended such occasions into recording sessions, none more provocative and controversial than those with a band called Death, a band that presaged the frantic punk music popularized by the Sex Pistols and others. The band followed a long line of greats who had recorded at the studio, which was located on Cass Avenue in the 1930s before moving to Second Avenue. In 1948, John Lee Hooker recorded “Boogie Chillen” there; ten years later, it was the site for Marv Johnson’s “Come to Me,” and by the time Davis purchased the studio in 1971, it was the prime studio for sessions by George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. To some degree, Death—consisting of the Hackney brothers, David, Bobby, and Dannis—wasn’t unanimously endorsed by Davis, whose Groovesville Productions studio was where they cut their demo in 1975. Davis was interested in signing the group if they would agree to change the name. A shrewd businessman and a fine guitarist, Davis felt that the band’s name would have no commercial appeal. By this time, he was preoccupied with stabilizing the First National Bank, the state’s first black-owned bank, where he was CEO.

  Davis may not have had the wherewithal to help the city or struggling artists, but Rep. John Conyers was instrumental in facilitating funds, literally and figuratively blowing his horn on their behalf. Few possessed his insight when it came to securing funds through the National Endowment for the Arts. He knew firsthand the plight of the city’s artists, particularly the painters, sculptors, and dancers, and he later made a similar effort, though in vain, to secure reparations for African Americans whose ancestors had toiled without pay through his House Resolution Bill 40 in 1989.10 Conyers often credited his inspiration for the bill to real estate agent Ray Jenkins, whom Detroiters knew as Reparations Ray. Few people were as relentless and determined as Ray was in the demand for reparations. One of his favorite stories as a real estate agent was the time he was showing a home to Stevie Wonder, who toured the home by feeling the walls. Much of Ray’s spirit and legacy on reparations—he died in 2009—can be found in the imaginative work of Ta-Nehisi Coates, particularly the very informative series on the subject in the Atlantic.

  As a once promising saxophone player and chair of the Detroit Jazz Center in 1977, Conyers was in a prime position to assure that the city’s musicians received some of the allocated funds. Edna Ewell Watson, one of the few black women of prominence in the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the former wife of John Watson, was on guard to make sure black artists would not be shortchanged when the cash flow began. Watson provided a vital link between the realms of arts and activism. In 1976, she supervised Communities United for Action (CUFA), which sponsored a program and exhibit to showcase the works of black artists. At the Jazz Center, she was the administrator of the Pioneer Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Sam Sanders. The Jazz Center was just one of the artistic coalitions flourishing in the city at that time; it was largely an offspring of the Strata Concert Gallery, which earlier in the decade, guided by Kenn Cox and Charles Moore, had featured such jazz greats as Elvin Jones, Charlie Mingus, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, and Herbie Hancock. Pianist and music educator James Tatum; Tribe, the brainchild of Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin; the Jazz Development Workshop, led by Harold McKinney and Marcus Belgrave; and RAPA House, with Ernie Rodgers at the helm, were a few of the organizations and institutions consciously involved in maintaining Detroit’s cultural and artistic pulse. Not only were the cultural presentations of the highest order, but also they were successful in attracting and sustaining a sizable audience of fans and supporters.

  Hundreds of Detroiters were in attendance at the Ford Auditorium on April 9, 1978, to pay tribute to Paul Robeson, who would have turned eighty on this date. Mayor Young and Paul Robeson Jr. were the honorary chairpersons, and the advisory council included Dr. Charles Wright, Judge George Crockett, librarian Clara Stanton Jones, Dr. Geneva Smitherman, historian Dr. Norman McRae, and Tommye Gail Myrick as artistic director.

  Among the entertainers at the evening concert were Harold McKinney and the All-Star Jazz Band, the Detroit City Dance Company, with choreography by Carole Morriseau, and the Brazeal Dennard Choral Group. These local artists were complemented by appearances from vocalist Chet Washington and actor Robert Earl Jones. It was a weeklong tribute to Robeson, who had visited Detroit many times, most notably at the invitation of the Rev. Charles Hill of Hartford Memorial Church. “Paul Robeson had many close friends in our city,” recalled Dr. Charles Wright, who wrote a biography of Robeson. “The first major appearance was in the late 1930s, when Paul appeared in concert at the Masonic Hall under the sponsorship of Miss Nellie Watts.”11 He filled the auditorium, and a similar aud
ience paid tribute to his legacy during that birthday celebration in 1978.

  In 1979, Charles McGee, along with artist Jean Heilbrunn and others, founded the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) in an attempt to invigorate the art scene. McGee was ten years old when he arrived in Detroit from rural South Carolina. The big city, with its noises and flashing neon lights, was all new to him, and so was school. When he entered elementary school, he couldn’t write his name, but at an early age his artistic skills were already beginning to develop. After a formal education in art, he embarked on his own career, and now his paintings, assemblages, and sculptures are on permanent display at such local institutions as the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

  McGee’s works are in Troy Beaumont and Detroit Receiving hospitals, and on constant display for riders of the downtown Detroit People Mover who pass through the Broadway station. His versatility as an artist matches his energy, and he seems to be perpetually involved in one project or another. “As long as I’m on the face of the earth, I plan to keep step as best I can. I think that the body certainly is going to slow down, has slowed down, but the mind, if you cultivate it, can keep on ticking. But it needs oiling just like a machine. And it all comes out of the type of person that you are too. I’m just so hungry for it that I don’t know what it means to have my cup full,” he told a Metro Times reporter.12