Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Few congressmen were as adept and knowledgeable about the affairs of Washington, DC, as Representative Charles C. Diggs. By the time he died, on August 24, 1998, he had brushed up against or angered just about every branch of the federal government, including the Supreme Court, which he had to deal with directly after he was censured in 1979 by a House committee for taking some $60,000 in kickbacks from his congressional staff and the Court refused to review his conviction. He claimed he was being unfairly prosecuted because of his race but was eventually sentenced to three to five years, of which he served only seven months in a minimum-security prison in Alabama. “I considered myself a political prisoner during my incarceration,” he told a reporter. “I was a victim of political and racist forces. I will go to my grave continuing to profess my innocence.”26

  During his twenty-five years in Congress, Diggs stretched his influence and commitment from Mississippi to Zimbabwe, or Rhodesia, as it was called when he was a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His knowledge of African Affairs in Congress was peerless, so much so that he was called Mr. Africa. Diggs endeared himself to black activists who were dedicated to the liberation of Africa from European colonialism. His comprehensive understanding of the liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau, all under Portuguese domination, made him welcome among such African revolutionaries as Samora Machel, Eduardo Mondlane, Marcelino dos Santos, Amilcar Cabral, and Agostino Neto. He was consistent in his demand that the United States stop opposing resolutions condemning Portugal’s oppressive policies. When colonialism ended, a civil war erupted among the various liberation movements. When Diggs learned that the CIA was covertly supporting UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), he used his influence as chairman of the African Subcommittee to cut off funding for the operation.27

  By the time of his death in 1998, Diggs’s accomplishments had long been obscured. He was living in Washington, DC, when he died, and he is buried in Warren, Michigan. His legacy continues in Detroit in the various funeral homes in the city that bear his name, though they are now known as Stinson-Diggs Chapel, Inc.

  While many Detroiters recalled Diggs’s achievements and mourned his passing, in the late 1990s, they were mainly concerned with the problems in the school system. In 1999, Governor John Engler began paving the way to take over the city’s duly elected school board. By the first of April, the deal was done, and the Michigan House of Representatives passed Public Act 10, a final version of the so-called school reform bill, putting Detroit’s school system under the mayor’s control. Mayor Dennis Archer immediately acceded to the takeover and demanded the resignation of the defunct board, replacing them with several prominent officials, many of whom were notable educators, including Detroit deputy mayor Freman Hendrix; William Beckham, president of New Detroit; Dr. Glenda Price, president of Marygrove College; Frank Fountain, vice president of DaimlerChrysler; Pam Aquirre, CEO of Mexican Industries of Michigan; and Marvis Coffield, director of Operation Get Down, a social agency on the city’s east side with an excellent reputation. The key member of the board was Arthur Ellis, the state superintendent of education and Engler’s close associate. His vote was crucial to whomever was installed to head the school system.28

  This decision was as hotly contested in Lansing as it was in the neighborhoods of Detroit, but most agreed that something drastic had to be done if it was true that, of the nearly two hundred thousand students in the system, only 30 percent were graduating on time, that the district’s academic performance was subpar, and that enrollment was steadily declining. Given the wretched conditions, it was understandable that complaints were coming from all quarters. The business community, a major player in the takeover, charged that the school system was not doing its job and that too many of their employees couldn’t read or write and were desperately in need of remedial education if they were to be hired and function successfully in the workplace. Members of grassroots organizations were vehemently opposed to the takeover “on the grounds that it disenfranchised Detroit residents, the vast majority of whom were black.”29 Their resentment was, to a great degree, muted because Archer’s new appointees were accepted by parents, teachers, and the students. Even so, a new board was only seven individuals, but it was with the twenty thousand school employees and their union that the rubber met the road. The differences about control may have been momentarily resolved, but the struggle was far from over. It clearly was not over for such community sentinels as Dr. John Telford, who as a former Detroit school superintendent, had a bird’s-eye view of the turmoil surrounding the takeover. In a column he wrote some years later, he stated:

  At the time of its unjust state takeover, Detroit Public Schools boasted a $93 million surplus and its test scores were at the state midpoint and rising, despite the city’s chronic social problems engendered by what nationally recognized urbanologist john a. powell and I described in a May 5, 1999, Detroit Free Press column as “concentrated poverty” by race and by residence. However, Detroit voters had recently passed a $1.5 billion construction-bond millage, and Governor Engler and those close to him were hungrily eying the potential contract bids, so they took DPS over and supplanted the democratically elected Detroit Board of Education with an appointed “reform” board simply because they could.30

  Only time would tell if the takeover would prove effective, but in the meantime the city’s workforce was still waiting for a similar move that might alter what had become an unrelieved, unchanging state of unemployment.

  Weeks before classes in the city were set to resume, there were intimations that the teachers were not exactly satisfied with the way things were going. As Labor Day approached, rumors of a possible strike began to make their way through the union. Signs in the holiday parade, like NO CONTRACT, NO WORK, signaled even stronger that a stoppage was imminent. At the end of the Labor Day weekend, the teachers went on strike. They spurned their negotiators’ recommendations and expressed their grievances about a longer school day, merit pay, class size, and other reforms proposed by the district’s new interim chief executive, David Adamany, who had been president of Wayne State University from 1982 to 1997.31 The walkout, which was in violation of a 1994 law barring teachers from striking, was a brief one; within a week it was over, and a tentative agreement was reached. “We consider it to be not only a victory for the teachers,” said John Elliott, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, “but for the students we teach. We’re not where we want to be, but we have moved up considerably if this agreement is approved.” He said the increase in wages was competitive, but the agreement was left for his members to ratify.

  Teacher ratification apparently didn’t necessarily mean satisfaction, particularly for the rank-and-file members, many of whom were still in the dark about the actual content of the contract. “On November 18, an estimated 5,000 students marched on the school center building, demanding not merely protection [from the large number of reported rapes in schools], but ‘books, supplies, lower class size.’ On December 2, about 75 teachers and students marched together to the school center building, echoing the same chant, and demanding to be informed of the contents of the teacher contract.”32 Because there was no demographic or racial breakdown of union representation available at that time, there is no way to determine how many of the teachers were African American.

  Somehow Mayor Archer, who had earlier failed to mediate the differences between the workers and the newspapers, was able to steer away from the wreckage of the conflicts, and in 2000 he was named Public Official of the Year by Governing magazine. The magazine didn’t discuss the fact that Archer was governing a rapidly changing demographic in which black middle-class flight from the city now exceeded white flight. There were other signs that the middle class was unsettled by the socioeconomic trends in the city, none more disturbing than the appreciable drop in median household income. “The folks with the wherewithal to leave, the folks with the jobs . . . those are the people [who] have t
he ability to exercise voting with your feet,” said David Martin, a professor of public policy at Wayne State University.33 And flight from the city was given additional impetus with the state’s repeal of a residency law for city employees in 1999. Without the residency requirement, as was predicted, the city would see its annual revenue reduced by more than $20 million. Much of the loss is attributed to the fact that nonresidents who work in the city pay half the city income tax rate of residents. “But many Detroiters believe the actual impact has been far greater, because many of the public employees who have left are police officers and firefighters whose departures have decimated formerly middle-class neighborhoods.”34

  But it wasn’t only police and firefighters in flight to the suburbs. Many African Americans, disappointed by service cutbacks and an increasingly decimated school system, sought better communities to raise their children, where there was more attention from the municipal government. On the other hand, the outflow was matched by a steady but lava-like influx of young white boys and girls from exurbia, gathering around the Fox Theatre and the Fillmore in the hopes of seeing Eminem. Just when everything south of Eight Mile Road was getting darker and darker, a white rapper emerged, and by the end of the year and the decade, his album The Slim Shady, his alter ego, would go platinum. He was the iconic entertainer on his way to commanding a considerable portion of the growing hip-hop flow of cash, at the same time presenting the first sprigs of gentrification. Not too far away from the neighborhood where Eminem was giving the city a fresh breath of recognition was a six-foot-high wall, now festooned with colorful images, that once stood as a dividing line between the black and white residents.

  Gentrification was one thing to worry about, but police brutality was a far more menacing immediacy for young black Detroiters. They were keenly aware there was little mercy awaiting them from the police, nor from school counselors or employment agencies, and certainly not from the drug dealers. Amid a dysfunctional educational system, library closures, and inadequate funding of other community institutions, young black Detroiters were marooned in a poverty of culture that forecast a culture of poverty. They could expect very little wiggle room between a rock and a hard place in a city devoid of guidance and direction.

  25

  EMERGENCY, RESURGENCY

  As bleak as the outlook was for young black Detroiters at the start of the new millennium, they might have found some inspiration in the appearance of Ahmed Kathrada in the city to promote his book Letters from Robben Island. Kathrada was Nelson Mandela’s cellmate in prison and, like his esteemed comrade, was incarcerated for his refusal to abide the draconian system of apartheid that strangled black opportunity. He was invited to Detroit by state senators Joe Young Jr., Virgil Smith, and Jackie Vaughn, all of Detroit and each significantly involved in the divestment movement that helped to cripple South Africa’s economy and aided the struggle to free its political prisoners. By sponsoring Kathrada’s trip to Detroit, the politicians were not only honoring the freedom fighter, but also renewing the memory of Mandela’s visit ten years earlier. “When we divested the state pension funds we saw the money start to come out of South Africa,” Smith said, during the celebration at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Young added, “We were able to change the world with a few pieces of legislation. Many didn’t believe it could work but it did.”1 Kathrada explained that his book was basically a compilation of his letters that he retrieved from guards after he was released in 1989, one year before Mandela. While they were in prison, he said, he also helped Mandela write his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Senators Young, Smith, and Vaughn had expended great time and energy toward ending apartheid in South Africa, but vestiges of a similar discriminatory system remained right in their own districts.

  As for black workers’ experiences in the various unions, there was nothing new. Race relations within the UAW were often a very conflicted issue. One would have thought that by the year 2000, years after the turbulent strikes and the relative successes of the civil rights movement—in which the UAW had played a vital role—that race relations would have been much better. Yes, there were three African Americans on the fifteen-member executive board, but less than 1 percent of the skilled tradespeople covered by the DaimlerChrysler AG–UAW national labor contract were black. On the other hand, according to Joseph Szczesny, author of African Americans on Wheels, black workers accounted for more than 40 percent of the automaker’s unskilled laborers. The situation was no better for blacks at Ford and General Motors.

  Racial diversity was much better at Comerica Bank, where Louise G. Guyton had recently been promoted to vice president in the Public Affairs Department. Guyton was the founder of the Greater Work Foundation. The mission of the foundation is to create positive community change through collaborative efforts by focusing on transforming neighborhoods and strengthening individuals and families—a difficult task indeed. For her tireless pursuits and commitment to the city, in 2000 she was the recipient of the Spirit of Detroit Award from the City Council. Like the Rev. C. L. Franklin and Martha Jean “The Queen” Steinberg, Guyton was a native of Memphis, and through her affiliation with a number of civic and civil rights organizations, there were opportunities to connect with them. Steinberg’s clarion calls were a popular staple of the city’s media, particularly radio. Her voice was stilled forever on January 29, and it was a sad day for her listening audience, who relied on her information and trusted her as “the town crier.”

  Mourning the loss of the Queen had not concluded for the city when almost a month later, on February 20, Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, eighty-eight, formerly the Rev. Albert B. Cleage Jr., made his transition. More than five hundred people attended his funeral services, and Menelik Kimathi, the second holy patriarch of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, said “For what he was able to do, we stand in awe.”2

  Despite the emotional setback of the loss of such inspirational personalities as Steinberg and Agyeman, there were signs of resilience and resurgence on the artistic front in the works of Tyree Guyton. Guyton was the subject of an HBO Films documentary, Come Unto Me: The Faces of Tyree Guyton. The film was the recipient of several honors, including an Emmy Award for editing in 2000 and an honorable mention at the Sundance Film Festival for director Nicole Cattell. Guyton calls his artistic efforts The Heidelberg Project, in which he uses discarded and found objects from within and outside abandoned buildings on Detroit’s east side. Since the project’s inception in 1986, it has been a source of controversy. Some neighbors appreciate his attempt to beautify the dilapidated buildings and squalid area, while others view his efforts as no more than a continuation of the detritus, a heap of garbage. Whatever the opinions of neighbors, the project has become a tourist attraction, even more so when several of his buildings were set aflame. The intentions of the project are best expressed on its website, which notes that it “offers a forum for ideas, a seed of hope, and a bright vision for the future. It’s about taking a stand to save forgotten neighborhoods. It’s about helping people think outside the box and it’s about offering solutions. It’s about healing communities through art—and it’s working!”3

  Similar artistic endeavors to uplift the community—and a far less controversial project of resurgence—were under way at the Plowshares Theater. Since the theater company was launched in 1989 by Gary Anderson and Michael Garza, it has more than fulfilled its mission of breaking new ground—in keeping with its name—nurturing aspiring actors, writers, and directors and presenting works that are fresh and innovative. Over the last decade, the company has been the recipient of both critical and popular acclaim, earning numerous awards in nearly every theater category, including rave reviews from area critics. Currently, it is the city’s only professional African American theater company and is gradually being recognized nationally. In 2000, Anderson received the Detroit Free Press’s Lawrence DeVine Award for outstanding contribution to the theater. “Ten years ago we couldn’t give away tickets,” Anderson sa
id as the company prepared to celebrate its tenth anniversary with a production of Ain’t Misbehavin’. “We wanted to begin our tenth anniversary season with a bang.”4

  Diana Ross’s Return to Love tour was another sign of possible Detroit resurgence. The tour was designed primarily as a reunion of the Supremes. Ross had the best intentions, but the tour failed to ignite, and fans were particularly disappointed when the planned “reunion” didn’t include Mary Wilson in the concert engagements. They were not prepared to witness Scherrie Payne and Lynda Lawrence alongside Ross in the June date, though apparently some had been tipped off that the tour was not as advertised. By July the promoters pulled the plug on the Return, and die-hard Ross fans were left to wonder, where did their love go? “People in this town,” wrote Susan Whitall, a reporter for the Detroit News, “have long memories. The black community in Detroit has an intense belief they’ve been done wrong by Diana.”5 Whatever the reason for the poor turnout and the canceling of the tour, it was another dark moment for Motown and its fans, many of whom were still grieving over the loss of Gwen Gordy Fuqua, Berry’s sister, who died in November 1999 in San Diego at seventy-one. But she was more than just Berry’s youngest sister, according to folks such as Maxine Powell, who had tutored the young men and women of Motown in the fine arts of decorum and etiquette. “When I think of Gwen,” Powell wrote in an article for the Michigan Chronicle, “I think of a person who always reached out to others . . . she embraced all of the positive qualities of life. She also took pleasure in inspiring, uplifting and coordinating wardrobes for others. . . . She lives on, especially through those whose lives were intertwined with hers.”6 And that would be practically everyone who came anywhere near Motown and experienced her genius in business and songwriting, for which she was never properly credited by her co-composers.