Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  The next day, I contacted my friend, Lonnie Peek, and a photographer, Curt Slaughter. Later I contacted a Wayne State University law student and associate, Ken Cockrel, and Ken, Dorothy Dewberry, and I set about to interview the parents of the slain youth, plus Lee Forsythe, James Sorter, and a security guard who was employed by the Algiers Motel. All three were scared out of their wits, but they reported that they saw Carl Cooper get shot with a shotgun, while being forced to stand spread-eagle against the motel wall, heard Aubrey Pollard being shot in another room, and heard Fred Temple begging for his life in another room, prior to being shot. Forsythe and Sorter were only two of seven young black men who were badly beaten by Detroit police that early morning, in addition to the three who were murdered. It was not until later that we learned that the Detroit Police Department had first erroneously reported that Cooper, Pollard, and Temple were snipers who had been killed in a gun battle with police authorities. This lie was later retracted.

  During our investigation, we learned that the Detroit Free Press had pictures of the crime scene and copies of preliminary autopsy reports, but they refused to grant us access to either.

  Dorothy Dewberry and I were the co-directors of SNCC, and we had recently brought H. Rap Brown to Detroit to speak to what turned out to be a huge crowd at the Dexter Theater on Dexter Avenue. The crowd was so large that Rap had to speak from the roof of the theater. During that visit, I told Rap about the killing of the three young men and the fact that it appeared that the Detroit police officers who murdered these young men were not going to be prosecuted to the full letter of the law, and we concluded that a “people’s tribunal” must be held to educate the public.

  Sometime later, I approached John Ashby and his harpist wife, Dorothy Ashby, about holding the people’s tribunal at the Dexter Theater. They said that the tribunal could be held there, but they asked us to try to obtain another venue because they had been threatened by the police because of the Rap Brown event. I agreed to search for another place to meet, because I knew that the police were not playing around and would probably be out to punish anyone whom they thought was connected to such a tribunal.

  Lonnie Peek and I hid Forsythe and Sorter in a private location because we knew that some members of the Detroit Police Department were looking for them to eliminate them as witnesses. We had been informed by the “street communication system” that they were kicking in doors in the neighborhood and questioning/threatening people to surrender their location. Curt Slaughter and I attended every day of the preliminary examination/hearing for officers Ronald August and Robert Paille. We were told there and shown by members of the Detroit Police Department by slashing-of-the-throat signs that we would never live long enough to hold any “damn tribunal.”

  The preliminary examination was interesting, because Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Avery Weiswasser never called any of the black witnesses. When I asked Mr. Weiswasser about this during one of the breaks, he told me, “I didn’t call them because their testimony would be irrelevant.” Needless to say, the killers were released on the basis on insufficient evidence to charge them.

  Four of what we believed to be plainclothes officers attempted to shoot Lonnie and me on Euclid or Philadelphia Street near Grand River Street. We were running so low to the ground that I had to push dirt and sand out of my pocket to maintain my balance. We survived. We also believed that the police had set our friend Ed Vaughn’s bookstore on fire during the week of July 26. We knew that hosting the tribunal was risky.

  A planning committee for the tribunal was organized, consisting of Lonnie Peek, Dorothy Dewberry, Richard Henry, Milton Henry, Madelyn Cheeks, our stenographer Carolyn Cheeks (later Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick), Ron Pugh, Selina Howard, Edward Howard, Ed Vaughn, myself, and a number of other people who were members of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. We approached Rev. Cleage, the pastor, asking for permission to host the tribunal at the church, and he enthusiastically gave his support and encouragement.

  Milton Henry advised the committee on how to hold a tribunal. Attorney Justin Ravitz presided as the judge, attorney Andrew Purdue served as the defense attorney for officers August, Paille, and Senak. Attorneys Milton Henry and Ken Cockrel served as prosecuting attorneys for the black community. The jury consisted of Mrs. Rosa Parks, People Against Racism director Frank Joyce, novelist John O. Killens, entrepreneur Ed Vaughn, and eight other people whom I cannot remember at the moment. The charges were three counts of first-degree murder, among other charges. Special seating was arranged and set aside for members of the press, including the Michigan Chronicle, the Detroit Free Press, the Detroit News, and international press from as far away as Sweden.

  Officers August, Paille, and Senak were invited to participate in the event, as were assistant prosecutors Weiswasser and James Garber, Wayne County Prosecutor William L. Cahalan, the families of the slain youths, an attorney for the Detroit Police Officers Association named Norman Lippitt, and witnesses from the Algiers Motel—Michael Clark, Lee Forsythe, James Sorter, and Charles Brown. After a presentation of the evidence, the three officers were convicted of first-degree murder, with sentencing to be handed down in the future by the community.

  The church was filled beyond capacity, with people standing in the balcony, every aisle, and the basement and spilling out to cover both sides of Linwood Avenue, in front of the church and across the street. The Rev. Cleage estimated that the crowd was easily more than two thousand, but the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, both of which had only a few words to say about the event, estimated the attendance at a couple of hundred, even though there were more than two hundred people standing outside who couldn’t get in. Loudspeakers were placed outside for their benefit.

  14.Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam, 1968), 1–29.

  In another account by Bill McGraw, a longtime reporter for the Detroit Free Press, he discloses that William Scott threw the bottle that set off the rebellion. See: http://www.bridgemi.com/detroit-bankruptcy-and-beyond/he-started-detroit-riot-his-son-wrestles-carnage

  15.Ibid.

  16.Joe T. Darden and Richard W. Thomas, Detroit: Race Riots, Racial Conflicts, and Efforts to Bridge the Racial Divide (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 13.

  17.Joann Castle, from her unpublished manuscript, Nov. 29, 2014. She further noted, “Another was the early strength of the Communist Party in Detroit and the class analysis portrayed in its slogan ‘Black and white, unite and fight.’ Black workers in the plants understood the real enemy. WCO’s mission of self-determination was consistent with this class analysis that perceived race to be a distraction in the real fight against injustice. In the summer of 1969, Tony and I were encouraged by Sheila to share the information we had secretly replicated at the Chancery office on the misuse of poverty program funds with representatives of The Black Manifesto. I knew a little about the Manifesto from what I had read in the newspaper.”

  18.Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 375.

  19.Paul Lee, Michigan Citizen, June 22, 2008, http://michigancitizen.com/prophet-of-possibility-pt-ii.

  20.Interview with Ron Lockett, June 4, 2014.

  21.Georgakas, op. cit., 43.

  22.Interview with Gene Cunningham, June 12, 2014.

  23.Nick Medvecky, e-mail, Oct. 8, 2014.

  Chapter 19: Our Thing Is DRUM!

  1. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying—a Study in Urban Revolution (New York: Viking, 1994), 21.

  2. Michael Hamlin and Michele Gibbs, A Black Revolutionary’s Life in Labor: Black Workers’ Power in Detroit (Detroit: Against the Tide Books, 2013), 125.

  3. Ibid., 19.

  4. Ibid., 34.

  5. Dick Cluster, ed., They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: 7 Radicals Remember the 60s (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 75.

 
; 6. Robert H. Mast, ed., Detroit Lives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 309. The Black Panther Party never gained much traction in Detroit, but they did have several serious encounters with the police, including some that resulted in the shooting deaths of officers. Dr. Ahmad A. Rahman’s essay on the party’s brief existence in the city provides an understanding of what happened and why. “Detroit’s insurrection of 1967 bequeathed complicated political dynamics for those who established a Panther presence in that city,” Professor Rahman concluded. “The Panthers’ simplistic ‘off the pig’ rhetoric did not meet the political challenge of the day. Youthful idealism and courageous dedication proved insufficient to the tasks of survival for a Panther underground. Without expertise in covert warfare, the Black Panthers’ overt warfare headed for inevitable defeat from the start. They were, in fact, an army marching blind.” Ahman A Rahman, “Marching Blind: The Rise and Fall of the Black Panther Party in Detroit, 1942–1971,” in Liberated Territory: Untold Perspectives on the Black Panther Party (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

  7. Cluster, op. cit., 78.

  8. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, DC: Open Hand Publishing, 1985), 545.

  9. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979 (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), 84.

  10.Forman, op. cit., 549.

  11.Cluster, op. cit., 100.

  12.Nick Medvecky, e-mail, Oct. 8, 2014.

  13.Patricia Bosworth, Jane Fonda: The Private Life of a Public Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 336.

  14.Kenneth and Sheila Cockrel Collection, Reuther Library, Accession 1379, Box 1. The letter from Fonda was dated April 26, 1972. Cockrel’s reply was written on May 8, 1972. And after hoping to meet her someday to discuss further any projects, he concluded the letter by congratulating her on winning an Oscar for her role in Klute and her acceptance speech, which he said “was handled most ‘correctly’ given the expectations of the vipers.”

  15.Mast, op. cit., 310.

  Chapter 20: Under Duress from STRESS

  1. David Ritz, Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye (New York: Da Capo Press, 1985), 148.

  2. Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying—a Study in Urban Revolution (Nre York: Viking, 1994), 168.

  3. Ibid.

  4. See http://rdpffa.org/main-files/pdf/unity/unity0112rev.pdf.

  5. Toledo Blade, Mar. 9, 1972, p. 1.

  6. Interview with Sadiq Bey, Mar. 28, 2014. Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd has a more personal account of this incident in her essay devoted to the memory of Chokwe Lumumba in Free The Land! ed. Charles Ezra Ferrell (Southfield, MI: Liberation Voice, 2015), 182.

  7. Sault Sainte Marie Evening News, Dec. 15, 1972, p. 11.

  8. See www.odmp.org/officer/reflections/2144-police-officer-robert-p-bradford-jr.

  9. Socialists Workers Party Militant, May 28, 1973, p. 3.

  10.Coleman Young with Lonnie Wheeler, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young (New York: Viking Penguin, 1994), 200.

  11.Ibid., 200.

  12.Detroit Black Journal with Trudy Gallant, 1989, http://abj.matrix.msu.edu/videofull.php?id=29-DF-1F.

  13.Al Stark, Detroit News Sunday Magazine, Mar. 18, 1973, p. 21.

  14.Dan Fisher, Los Angeles Times, Apr. 15, 1971, p. 2.

  15.Young, op. cit., 219.

  Chapter 21: Muses and Music

  1. Naomi Long Madgett, “Dudley Randall’s Life and Career,” Modern American Poetry, www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/life.htm.

  2. Melba Joyce Boyd, Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 3. Boyd also produced and directed a fifty-four-minute documentary on Randall’s life entitled Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (1995).

  3. William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 168. Randall’s FBI file was relatively thin compared to those of other writers, such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Amiri Baraka, even when covering only the three years from 1966 to 1969.

  4. James Edward Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 76.

  5. Harold Bloom, African-American Poets, vol. 1 (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009), 32.

  6. Haki R. Madhubuti, Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems, 1966–2009 (Chicago: Third World Press, 2009), xxi.

  7. Betty DeRamus, “On Dudley Randall,” Detroit News, Aug. 15, 2000, www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/life.htm.

  8. Smethurst, op. cit., 227.

  9. See www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/randall/life.htm.

  10.Martha Reeves, and Mark Bego, Dancing in the Street: Confessions of a Motown Diva (New York: Hyperion, 1994), 201.

  11.Cited from the brochure “A Salute to Paul Robeson” dispensed that evening at the concert, which was co-published by the Paul Robeson Archives and the Afro-American Museum of Detroit.

  12.Nick Sousanis, “The Art of Seeing Art,” Detroit Metro Times, Jan. 4, 2006, www.metrotimes.com/detroit/the-art-of-seeing-art/Content?oid=2183585.

  13.Barbara Weinberg and Herb Boyd, Jazz Space Detroit (Detroit: Jazz Research Institute, 1980), 17.

  14.Black World, Mar. 1975, 81.

  Chapter 22: Coleman and Cockrel

  1. “By the summer of 1975, now a year and a half into new Mayor Coleman Young’s first term, the city was about to nose dive into even deeper and yet more troubled waters. On a sweltering July day in 1975, Bolton’s Bar off Livernois was busy keeping its white clientele cool. With the continual racial fallout from the ’67 riot 8 years previous still spreading like a cancer, most of the old mom and pop stores had long since pulled out and re-anchored in the suburbs. But not Andrew Chinarian, the bar’s owner, who had ignored the tidal wave of white flight over the depressive decade of the 70s to man the last stand of whites in Old Detroit.

  “On July 28th, Chinarian exited the bar, only to find several black youths tampering with a car in the parking lot. Chinarian fired a shot at 18 year old Obie Wynn, striking him in the back of the head. Wynn died 9 hrs later.

  “Chinarian claimed he was only attempting to fire a warning shot over Wynn’s head. The triggering point came when Chinarian was taken into custody and then released on a paltry $500 bond. The neighborhood at Livernois & 7 Mile exploded. Bolton’s Bar was ransacked and set on fire.”

  See www.detroits-great-rebellion.com/Post-Riot-Detroit.html.

  2. Coleman Young with Lonnie Wheeler, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Coleman Young (New York: Viking, 1994), 232.

  3. Rev. Charles Butler, Detroit Lives, ed. Robert Mast (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 193.

  4. Ibid., 196.

  5. Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 113; and Detroit Free Press, Nov. 7, 1977.

  6. Jeanie Wylie, Poletown (Community Betrayed) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1990), xiv.

  7. Herb Boyd, “Last Hired, First Fired,” Detroit Metro Times, Oct. 16–30, 1980, p. 1.

  8. Nick Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C. L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 309.

  9. Ibid., 316.

  10.Wylie, op. cit., 139.

  11.Bill McGraw, The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 8.

  12.Interview with Moten, Sept. 17, 2014.

  13.Tom Lawton, Michigan Journal, Oct. 3, 1979, p. 2.

  14.Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying—a Study in Urban Revolution (Boston: South End Press, 1994), 211.

  Chapter 23: Postindustrial Blues

  1. See www.metrolyrics.com/detroit-city-
blues-lyrics-fats-domino.html.

  2. Ron Chepesiuk, The War on Drugs: An International Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1999), 269. An inside view of the gang is disclosed in Raymond Canty’s Autobiography of Butch Jones Y.B.I Young Boys Inc. (H Publications, 1996).

  3. Interview with George Gaines, June 13, 2014. A similar account of this experience can be found on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9hp07cQ8hA.

  4. Dudley Randall, Rose and Revolutions—The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009), 208.

  5. Interview with Emmett Moten, September 17, 2014.

  6. Herb Boyd, Detroit Metro Times, Apr. 2–16, 1981, p. 10.

  7. Ibid., 11.

  8. Steve Babson, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (Detroit: Wayne State University Press/Adama Books, 1984), 215.

  9. Owosso [MI] Argus-Press, Nov. 3, 1986, p. 20.

  10.James Barron, “Judge Is Critical of Detroit Mayor,” Detroit Free Press, Sept. 2, 1984, www.nytimes.com/1984/09/02/us/judge-is-critical-of-detroit-mayor.html.

  11.Judge Feikens also incurred the wrath of Anna Diggs-Taylor, who wrote him a letter released to the press in which she chastised him for his insensitive remarks about the inability of African Americans to run a city. In 1997 she became the first chief judge to receive the baton from a previous black chief judge.

  12.Ze’ev Chafets, Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit (New York: Vintage e-book, Oct. 1991), 1.

  13.Stephen Ward, ed., Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 322.

  14.Dianne Hudson, producer, and Ed Gordon, host, “Teen Gang Violence,” American Black Journal, 1985, http://abj.matrix.msu.edu/videofull.php?id=29-DF-1D.

  15.Coleman Young and Lonnie Wheeler, Hard Stuff: The Autobiography of Mayor Coleman Young (New York: Viking, 1994), 287.

  16.Stephen Franklin, “Murders Torment Detroit,” Chicago Tribune, Jan. 13, 1987, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987–01–13/news/8701040022_1_highest-murder-rate-mayor-coleman-young-suburbs.

  17.Peter Gavrilovich and Bill McGraw, eds., The Detroit Almanac: 300 Years of Life in the Motor City (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 2001), 501.