Singing in a Strange Land
Page 31
Though an omen of further difficulties to come, the absence of many whites did not dampen the enthusiasm of the day. As the fifty-seven-year-old Mrs. Ethel Cherise well understood, the cause of the joy lay in the seriousness of the moment. “I am here to walk for our rights,” she told a reporter, “and nothing could keep me away.” The march celebrated publicly an emerging black consciousness, one long in the making through migration and adjustment to this urban world, a consciousness nurtured in the attitudes of returning veterans, discussions over the Brown decision, Emmett Till’s open casket, and the example of the people of Montgomery, Alabama. C. L. Franklin had every right to feel proud of his role in this. Well before 1963, his Sunday sermons and pointed public letter encouraged the new tone now so evident on Woodward Avenue, as the largest civil rights demonstration ever held in the nation began.24
As a small percentage of the marchers eventually squeezed into their seats at Cobo Hall, filling the arena to capacity, Ramsey Lewis, Dinah Washington, Jimmy McGriff, Erma Franklin, and the Four Tops entertained. The formal program began with C. L.’s mentor, Reuben Gayden, offering the scriptural reading. Then the entire assembly rose to join in James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song widely recognized as the Negro national anthem. The mayor briefly greeted the crowd, as did Walter Reuther and other officials. DCHR leaders were then introduced. A mass choir sang the civil rights standard “We Shall Overcome,” and Lillian Hatcher, the black UAW official, spoke of the role of black women in the freedom struggle. Three speakers, among them Albert Cleage, spoke of Detroit’s civil rights problems, and C. L. Franklin raised the offering as the choir sang a selection from Rossini. Only then did Congressman Charles C. Diggs Jr. approach the microphone to introduce the main speaker.25
King thanked C. L. Franklin, “my good friend,” and the council for organizing the demonstration and applauded the marchers for their evident “discipline” and “commitment to non-violence.” He reminded the audience of the promise of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, and that a century later, “the Negro . . . is still not free” in what was yet “an anemic democracy” in America. “Segregation is a cancer in the body politic,” he intoned, and with a quickened rhythmic cadence, the Baptist preacher responded directly to the Alabama governor’s recent inaugural speech. “In a sense,” King exhorted, “we are through with segregation now, henceforth, and forever more.” African American people had changed dramatically in recent decades. “A new sense of dignity and . . . self-respect” were obvious. “The Negro came to feel that he was somebody.” Rejecting calls for gradualism, King stressed “the urgency of the moment” in this ongoing “social revolution”: “We want all our rights, we want them here and we want them now.” Embracing this “magnificent new militancy,” King nonetheless warned against racial separatism. He understood the psychological frustration many felt but insisted that “black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy.”
“This afternoon I have a dream,” King then announced with heightened emphasis. “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.” His dream foretold of a time when “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders will be able to live together as brothers. I have a dream,” he called out, reaching higher, the fervent audience response encouraging him, that “little white children and little Negro children” will be “as brothers and sisters. I have a dream this afternoon,” he prayed again, that “one day” homes and churches will not be burned to the ground “because people want to be free. I have a dream this afternoon,” he declared, his rhythmic tones setting the audience to clapping and swaying, that “there will be a day we will no longer face the atrocities that Emmett Till and Medgar Evers had to face. That all men can live in dignity. I have a dream this afternoon,” he reiterated, at one with the audience now, that “my four little children” will not have to suffer “the same young days” of discrimination “that I had to come up in. They will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.” He shared with the ecstatic congregation—for they had church that afternoon in Cobo Hall—his vision of a world where the words of the prophet Amos were a lived experience, where “justice will roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” “One day,” he even dared, “we will recognize the words of Jefferson that all men are created equal . . . endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—Yes—I have a dream this afternoon.”26
As the throng eased back into their seats, the combined choirs offered a musical selection in memory of Medgar Evers, and a special offering collected a scholarship fund for his children. C. L. Franklin then introduced other dignitaries as the crowd slowly moved toward the doors.
In the immediate aftermath of the march, a euphoric mood captivated much of black Detroit. Pickets appeared at breweries that had never hired black workers—their contract with the Brewery Workers union prohibited such action—and at local grocery-store chains that collectively employed less than a handful of blacks in senior staff positions. Within days, black workers, salesmen, and managers received new promotions. Letters also came into civil rights offices applauding the march. Mrs. E. Backer, a self-described “negro mother without a diploma or a job,” wrote Arthur Johnson, telling him how “proud I am to be a negro.” In her “most humble manner,” fully aware that she and her friends, lacking education, “are not qualified [and] have only you to rely on,” she pleaded for black leaders to “please hold on to this beautiful unity” achieved on June 23. She then offered the suggestion that all of the groups unite into one organization “according to parlimentary [sic] procedures, and please don’t let hunger for power or the desire to make individual history mar this wonderful goal.”27 By mid-July, it appeared that Mrs. Backer’s hopes were answered as some thirty Detroit organizations, from the Cotillion Club, the Trade Union Leadership Council, and the NAACP to GOAL and the DCHR, formed a new coordinating group, Operation Negro Equality (ONE), with an emphasis on obtaining equal economic opportunity.28
But appearances deceived. Behind the scenes, vicious infighting persisted. In city government, allies of the traditional leadership advised that to control Franklin’s group, it was necessary to control Albert Cleage. “This man’s star is on the ascendancy in this city,” an unsigned report suggested. “Anybody who wants to destroy the Council must contend with him. His position is pivotal.” A significant portion of ONE’s steering committee, along with leaders of TULC and the Baptist Ministerial Alliance, sought to do just that. Two days after the march, another dispute erupted that worried Franklin, as he, too, now strove for unity. James Del Rio, a wealthy realtor long active in the NAACP, a New Bethel trustee, and a close friend and coworker in organizing the march with C. L., stated on June 25 that the success of the demonstration was “a direct repudiation of the NAACP.” At the national convention of the NAACP in Chicago over the July 4 holiday, the Detroit chapter led a walkout when Del Rio appeared as a panelist to discuss housing issues. Franklin quickly sought to play down the tension.29
C. L. Franklin observed the jostling egos, competing political positions, and public posturing with some dismay. He was certainly capable of similar conduct, but in the months following the march, he took a different path. For the first time in his career, he actively led a secular, political organization to which he committed his considerable abilities. He chaired mass meetings at New Bethel and elsewhere of five hundred and more; oversaw the creation of a program that focused on equality in jobs, housing, and schools; conferred with other leaders repeatedly to iron out differences and form a common approach; and met with the mayor to obtain his active, public support. It was, nonetheless, a complicated dance choreographed against the swirling forces of protest that formed what Albert Cleage called a “summer hurricane.”30
At three o’clock in the morning on Friday, July 5, a twenty-four-year-old black woman walked with a
friend near the intersection of John R Street and Watson, in the area known before urban renewal as Paradise Valley. Two white officers stopped the black couple, confiscated a pocketknife from Cynthia Scott’s friend, Charles Marshall, and interrogated the pair. Police later claimed that the couple acted suspiciously, incongruously explaining that Scott brandished “‘several bills of currency’ in her hand” as they approached. The police also claimed that Scott had yet another pocketknife and slashed at Patrolman Theodore Spicher as he tried to put her in the squad car. Marshall stated that Scott possessed no knife, told the officer that because she had done nothing wrong she would not get in the car, and began to walk across the street. Both Marshall and Spicher agreed on what happened next: the patrolman drew his gun and, as Scott reached the opposite curb, fired twice, hitting her in the back with each bullet. As she turned, he fired a third shot, striking her this time “in the lower right stomach.”31 Scott fell dead.
City prosecutor Samuel H. Olsen quickly exonerated Spicher solely on the testimony of the two policemen. Olsen, whose reputation was already dismal among black residents, refused to credit the statements of other eyewitnesses, all of whom were African Americans, because he considered their accounts “too biased.” That Scott was “an admitted prostitute,” familiar to the two officers as such, was widely known among black East Side residents, as was Spicher’s reputation for excessive violence toward African American suspects in his custody. Immediately following Olsen’s ruling, Richard Henry called a demonstration for Saturday, July 13, at police headquarters. The small protest attracted activists from the DCHR and GOAL, as well as from Uhuru, a black-only youth group founded the previous March by students at Detroit’s Wayne State University. Led by Luke Tripp, a twenty-two-year-old senior majoring in mathematics and physics, Uhuru (which means freedom, in Swahili) positioned itself rhetorically as even more militant than Cleage and the Henry brothers. Cleage found himself in the odd position of criticizing the angry crowd inflamed by Tripp for its “simple thinking” about violence as he worked to calm the protesters. No city official heeded the call for a full investigation of Spicher’s actions. In late July, attorney Milton Henry, representing Scott’s mother in an unsuccessful $5 million damage suit, cross-examined Spicher for more than two hours in court. Henry depicted Spicher’s strained, inconsistent testimony as “conclusive evidence that the killing was a plain case of murder.” Yet despite the outcry—even highly respectable ministers wrote angry, anguished letters to city officials—no other groups but DCHR and Uhuru joined GOAL in the demonstrations.32
The fury that followed the killing of Cynthia Scott indicated the emergence of a new tone in black protest. Much had changed in a very short time. The public voice of the migrants had been hard won, their determination fierce and their commitment deep. It was in this context that the deeply talented C. L. Franklin proved so effective. But these rural influences had not framed this new consciousness. Rather, Detroit’s crowded concrete neighborhoods, patrolled by “brutes in blue,” as Luke Tripp called the police, had fueled it. This new expression accepted as a given the foundation already established but took its tone from thwarted expectations. The difference was not simply generational: the northern-born and -raised trio of Cleage and the Henry brothers were decades older than Tripp and his fellow students, all of whom moved toward greater militancy that summer. The reactions to the lynching of Emmett Till had marked a significant moment in this process, but it was now, when continued horrors tore at the rising expectations generated by the civil rights movement, that this angry new voice found broader expression.
The most astute leaders recognized the depth of the problem. As an internal analysis by Detroit’s Urban League acknowledged honestly, what gave the militants their credibility was the critical fact that the civil rights movement in Detroit, as in most northern cities, “has been of greatest benefit to a very small segment of Negroes.” College graduates and some with high school degrees fared well, positioned as they were to take advantage of new opportunities. But for the majority of black, working-class Detroit, lacking marketable skills, education, and a union card, the freedom movement remained “of negligible good.” These were the “masses” both the new and the traditional leadership claimed to speak for, although even Albert Cleage quaked before their actual fury. In reality, no one spoke for them.33
This militancy, of course, was not totally new. Detroit had long been the center of black nationalist thinking, and Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist philosophy remained evident in the city long after its national strength ebbed in the 1920s. The Nation of Islam, a separatist African American religious movement, had its origins in Detroit in the early 1930s and grew in succeeding decades. If the Garvey movement was largely dormant in the 1960s, its remaining members honored for their longevity rather than their contemporary impact, the opposite was the case with the Nation. Under Elijah Muhammad, the organization had grown significantly in the 1950s, particularly as the result of the missionary work of a recently released prison convert, Malcolm Little. Known by his Muslim name, Malcolm X, compelling and charismatic, preached a version of Islamic faith (Christianity, he exhorted, was the slaveholders’ religion), black pride and self-dignity, and an implacable opposition to racists, among whom he publicly included all white Americans. His biological brother, Wilfred X, led Detroit’s Mosque No. 1. By 1963, Malcolm’s message exerted a powerful, influential appeal. He spoke truths, however simplistically framed at times, “like thunder beginning to gather its strength,” and his uncompromising militant perspective that famously demanded black liberation by any means necessary filtered into neighborhood debates throughout black America. Some welcomed his influence with a wry smile, as if they had been waiting for some time. The “one thing I loved about our group,” Milton Henry recalled of his comrades in GOAL, was that we “wanted to [do] whatever was necessary, before Malcolm even said that, by any means. [We] wanted to do what was necessary to become human.”34
As Cynthia Scott’s murder suppressed the euphoria that followed King’s June speech, so too another tortured cycle of uplift and disillusionment drew national attention. On August 28, King delivered a magnificent address before 250,000 people, largely black, at the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capitol. It became known internationally as the “I Have a Dream Speech,” and it borrowed some of the phrasing, ideas, and tones he had explored in Detroit two months earlier. Following King’s speech, New York attorney Conrad J. Lynn, with the support of Cleage and the Henrys, released a statement to the press announcing the formation of the Freedom Now Party. Unrealistically predicting 1 million votes for the new party in the 1964 elections, Lynn, a longtime political activist influenced by Marxism and, at the time, counsel for an integrated group of demonstrators arrested while protesting New York’s segregated building-trades unions, suggested the various African independence movements as models for “American Negroes.” He also insisted that the party was not “anti-white”: “Our banner is not racism, but self-reliance.” Within a week of Lynn’s announcement, LaMar Barron, an unemployed twenty-nine-year-old Uhuru member, wrote the Chronicle in his capacity as the acting chair of the Detroit branch of the party. He attacked gradualism, derided black dependency on elected “white liberals . . . who are responsible for whitewashing the murderer of Cynthia Scott,” and endorsed an all-black party as the best means to end the political paralysis inherent in “alternating between a Democratic Lucifer and a Republican Satan.”35
On Sunday, September 15, slightly more than three weeks later, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the center of the city’s civil rights movement, where waves of young people had excitedly left for Bull Connor’s jails only months before. The explosion killed four young girls as they left Sunday school. On Tuesday, September 17, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth eulogized Carole Robertson. The next day, Reverend King struggled with the darkness that permeated his dream as he eulogized Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley. It w
as the twenty-ninth bombing of African American structures in Birmingham since 1951. Little wonder, then, that increasing numbers of African Americans questioned a belief that direct, nonviolent resistance to evil would both release the oppressed and transform the oppressor.36
In this charged atmosphere C. L. Franklin and Albert Cleage planned for a national conference of black civil rights leaders that November in Detroit. Although Cleage maintained his public criticism of established black leaders, to most observers the two men appeared to work well together. By mid-October, the DCHR released the conference schedule: Saturday’s panels would discuss topics including jobs and black political action, as well as plans for “direct action programs relative to these topics”; Sunday, November 11, Adam Clayton Powell and Mahalia Jackson would headline a massive rally at Cobo Hall. An impressive list of civil rights leaders and activists indicated they would attend, including Reverend Kelly Miller Smith who, along with John Lewis, had led the student civil rights movement in Nashville in 1959; three members of King’s staff; and William Worthy, the left-wing correspondent of the Baltimore Afro-American. As late as Sunday, October 27, Detroit’s leading newspaper ran a major story on the Northern Negro Leadership Conference, in which C. L. noted that the new group he expected to emerge from the gathering “has not been clearly defined and won’t be until after this meeting.” But Cleage and the Henry brothers had developed a clear agenda for the proposed new group well before October. Less than twenty-four hours later, Cleage attacked Franklin in print, resigned from the DCHR, and announced his own conference to be held that same weekend. Even in these mercurial times, the news stunned onlookers.37
As Franklin debated how to respond, a preoccupied Martin Luther King arrived in Detroit the following week for a speech to the Michigan Education Association. When pressed by reporters to comment on the new party, King generalized, indicating that he knew little about the specifics. Discouraged by the Democratic Party’s capitulation “to the undemocratic ideals of the southern Dixiecrats” as well as by the Republicans’ willingness to “too often accept the blatant hypocrisy of the right-wing Northerners,” King allowed that he “would favor something like this if it would increase the Negro’s voice in politics.” King and Franklin huddled for a brief discussion during that busy day. King subsequently endorsed publicly the originally scheduled conference and announced that he would send representatives to discuss a merger between Franklin’s new group and SCLC, with the intent of creating a new national civil rights group with a presence in northern cities.38