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Human Beings Can Only Take So Much
Last week as Baltimore was ablaze with anger over the wrongful death of Freddie Gray, you can be sure that those of us who lived in Detroit 48 years ago this coming July experienced d�j� vu as images of burning buildings, looting, police brutality and general chaos returned unbidden in 3-D Technicolor nightmares. I was in the midst of it then and slept all of 10 hours over six days as I was thrust into emergency relief work -- a kind of baptism by fire.
I was a very young cleric in 1967, committed to urban ministry in the city of my birth and in which I would live once again for the next 20 years. The only African-Americans I had known or known of to that point were a) the domestics who worked for the summer people in the northern Michigan village in which I did some of my growing up, b) the maids, elevator operators and waiters in the downtown hotel in which we stayed on the occasions we came to Detroit, c) three fellow students in my college class and d) two seminary classmates -- one of whom was James Cone, then completing his doctorate.
In the downtown Detroit parish to which I had been appointed assistant pastor just a month before the riot, there was a scattering of African-American families, including a well-known attorney, a Ford Motor Co. executive and a school principal. They and their families dwelt in some of Detroit's finest new housing near the city's center and were in all respects upwardly mobile far beyond anything my family had ever known.
It was difficult for me to understand how it was that the arson and looting during the uprising had been committed by African-Americans. Of the 43 persons who died in the conflict, 33 were black and 10 white, 26 of the 33 shot by police or National Guardsmen -- several of them in the back. Over 7,200 arrests were made inside of six days, including 703 juveniles -- one as young as 4 years old. In all, 2,509 stores were looted or burned, what remained of 412 buildings had to be demolished and 388 families were left homeless.
What transpired during that hot July week sparked one of the most remarkable exoduses from any American city ever -- the flight of white residents, white-owned businesses and their tax dollars from what was up until then the nation's fifth-largest city with a population of 1,670,144. It is now approaching a low of 600,000, of which 83 percent are African-American. The city has vast tracts across its 139 square miles from which whole neighborhoods have disappeared. Detroit's 1915 population was about what it is today.
Along with a good many white residents of the city shocked by the violence, I had much to learn about what happened and why. What happened, by the conventional account, was that basically bad people decided to behave badly and that if some of them died as a result, it served them right. As I heard it said innumerable times, "The colored have always been a problem here." Or more directly : "Those n------ are animals."
What happened was akin to the explosion of a pressure cooker. A white power structure with its tough-guy, dominantly white police force played its trump card of white supremacy once too often. Why? Because they could, and that was that. So began the rebellion of 1967 with a raid on a well-known after-hours drinking club.
What led up to that night was of a piece with the urban unrest of that era. A long view suggests that it had its genesis in the slave trade of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries as well as indentured servitude on the cotton plantations of the Deep South, when human beings were thought by their owners to be not quite human -- three-fifths of a person on an individual basis for almost a hundred years until 1865 -- and with no or few civil rights, bound to serve the master until death would them part.
I learned in high school history that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, that the Union won the war and that the nation went on to live happily ever after. It was not until I sat in a college lecture hall and heard a professor speak of Reconstruction and Jim Crow did I learn that in many ways theoretically emancipated slaves -- men and women of color -- were far worse off after the War Between the States than before.
At a fairly young age, I knew about the Ossian Sweet affair, later brought to wider attention by Kevin Boyle's 2004 book Arc of Justice. I was familiar with it because an uncle and aunt of mine lived in the east side Detroit neighborhood where Sweet, a black physician, bought a house in 1925. My relatives were part of the mob that set out to remove Dr. Sweet and his wife from their home in the late summer of that year. As I grew up, I heard Aunt Bertha's scathing racist comments about the Sweets and how they had no business -- "being colored and all" -- moving into what had been to that time a solid, all-white area.
Another lesson came in research for a book about Reinhold Niebuhr's Detroit years, 1915-1928. To set the stage for what I intended to propose as a significant influence on the development of Niebuhr's powerful social ethic, I amassed data about the city as it was in that time. Among other things I learned was that when troops from Michigan were deployed to Europe in 1916 during the last 17 months of the Great War, the burgeoning factory culture of Detroit and environs desperately needed replacements.
Executives of the automobile industry and related companies decided to replace the doughboys with cheap help from the South. They recruited African-American men, leased trains from the railroads and packed their new hires into day coaches of an outdated style with all-wooden construction -- less safe but cheaper. As the railroad convoys, making their way north from such locales as Georgia and Alabama, approached Detroit, word came from the officials of the Michigan Central station and Fort Street Union Depot that the "colored" in such large numbers would not be allowed to detrain at either terminal. Thus the locomotives ground to a stop about two miles from downtown, leaving the newcomers to walk the distance to meet their new employers' representatives.
Of course, after the armistice, those men not felled by the flu epidemic or maimed for life as casualties of battle returned to claim their jobs in plant and factory. The temporary help from the South either went back home or remained in a Detroit ghetto already forming. Men and women living there fell in love, married and had children. Thus did the African-American population of the city begin to exceed that which had formed years before as the Underground Railroad brought many a southern black to the city. What helped was Detroit's boom in the 1920s, when more than 20 new hotels were built, offering jobs as maids, bellhops and porters to African-Americans.
By the mid-1920s, race had become a critical issue in the city as working-class whites, egged on by the Ku Klux Klan, became convinced that African-Americans were their natural enemies. That bias showed itself on September 9, 1925, when a white mob descended on the Sweets' home. One of the crowd was shot dead after stones were thrown at the dwelling as several persons in the mob appeared to charge the house. Ultimately, the Sweets and some of their co-defendants were found not guilty of murder, but not until jail time had been served. Charges against the others were dropped.
The issue, of course was open housing -- or lack of it. Real estate covenants against Jewish and black ownership or occupation existed as parts of many a deed and title in those days. As a second African-American migration occurred during the Second World War, housing once again became a hot issue. Twenty years later, it remained a problem, with people of color more or less limited to where they could live. Then came July 23, 1967 -- a date that will live in its own infamy in the civic consciousness of those who witnessed the unbridled anger of a repressed citizenry.
Withal, over the last half-century Detroit, has sent five African-Americans to Congress, has had four African-American mayors and, as of this writing, a majority of African-Americans as members of its City Council. The police chief is an African-American as are a good many members of the force he commands. Perhaps of greater importance are the large African-American churches, some of them presided over by nationally known preachers who wield considerable influence for the good in the shaping of public policy.
Yet there are a number of Detroit neighborhoods today where if a black man were to be shot in the back by a police officer of whatever color -- and that in cold blood -- I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a major protest, if only because life in those decaying neighborhoods has not improved much since 1967 and, in some cases, has become more difficult, despite the amazing renewal of the city's downtown and areas contiguous to it.
All the flash of a downtown on its way to restoration notwithstanding, the lack of fully functional police and fire services, reasonable security against crime, a decent public school system and livable neighborhoods mean that Detroit will continue to carry in its collective gene pool the potential for the kind of explosion as Baltimore has so recently suffered. Human beings can only take so much.
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