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http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/417a09168e24a0d4ab4e5b1e4a6568f2.JPG
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Detroit Historical Society
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
A language of the resource
en-us
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Jackie DeYoung
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Jackie DeYoung was born in Detroit, MI where she lived during the 1967 disturbance. DeYoung spent 35 years with the Detroit Police Department. She currently lives in Detroit, MI.
Interviewer's Name
The first and last name of the interviewer.
Bree Boettner
Interview Place
The place where the interview was conducted.
Grosse Pointe
Date
The date of the interview in MM/DD/YYYY format.
04/05/2016
Interview Length
The total length of the interview in HH:MM:SS format.
00:46:50
Transcriptionist
The first and last name of the transcriptionist.
Danail Gantchev
Transcription Date
The date of the transcription in MM/DD/YYYY format.
5/11/2016
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
<p>BB: This is Bree Boettner with the Detroit 1967 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Jackie DeYoung today at her home in Grosse Pointe. Thank you Jackie for sitting down with us today.</p>
<p>JD: Oh you’re welcome.</p>
<p>BB: If you could start by telling me when and where you were born.</p>
<p>JD: I was born in Detroit at the old Providence Hospital on East Grand Boulevard. At the time my parents lived at 3010 West Chicago Boulevard. It was an apartment building between Wildemere and Lawton.</p>
<p>BB: Did you have any siblings?</p>
<p>JD: No, I’m an only child.</p>
<p>BB: And what did your parents do?</p>
<p>JD: My father was an attorney. My father was born in Detroit in 1904 in the middle of the Eastern Market on St. Antoine and Winder. My mother was born in New York, came through Cleveland, and settled here. My father went through Detroit Public Schools. He went to the Bishop School in the Eastern Market area. Then he went to what was Central High School, which is now on the campus – well it was Forest — what is it called — Old Main. That was Central High School and my dad went there. When he graduated, which must have been about 1918 or 1920, it became part of Wayne, which wasn’t a state university at the time. So he went to Law school there, same building.</p>
<p>BB: Okay, wow.</p>
<p>JD: You did not have to go through [an] undergraduate degree at that time; you just went to law school. So he graduated before he was able to become a member of the bar. He wasn’t twenty-one yet.</p>
<p>BB: Oh wow, high achiever. Awesome, okay. Just to preface your parents and you lived on Chicago?</p>
<p>JD: Yes, in an apartment building.</p>
<p>BB: Explain your childhood growing and living in the Detroit area.</p>
<p>JD: Well, it was a very good childhood. My mother and I – my mother didn’t drive until much later. She learned to drive probably when I was in school, [when I was] five, six, seven. So we took buses everywhere. All over downtown, wherever we had to go. You could walk anywhere. We had accessible shopping on Dexter Avenue. It was a very easy childhood. There were very few security fears, or crime, or anything like that.</p>
<p>BB: Do you remember where you went to school in the area?</p>
<p>JD: I went to Brady School.</p>
<p>BB: For all grades or?</p>
<p>JD: I went there until third grade. Then we moved to Manor and Seven Mile, which is on the northwest side, near Meyers Road. After that I went to McDowell school to the eighth grade. And then I went to Mumford High School through graduation. At the time the school system had started an advanced, sort of like an AP program, but they were only running it at Cass Tech. My mother and a group of parents who were active in the PTA did not want us taking the bus down to Cass every day. So they petitioned the school board, and the board opened the program at Mumford because there were so many students in the neighborhood who would have qualified for it.</p>
<p>BB: What year did you graduate from high school?</p>
<p>JD: 1961 I graduated from Mumford.</p>
<p>BB: And was your school integrated? Was it strictly white?</p>
<p>JD: My grade school was very integrated, as was Mumford. The black population at the time lived closer to Eight Mile, but they lived on the same streets we did. Manor, Monte Vista, just further west toward Eight Mile North.</p>
<p>BB: What’d you do after high school?</p>
<p>JD: Then I went to the University of Michigan for four years. I graduated. I came home and I was living with my parents on Manor.</p>
<p>BB: Okay.</p>
<p>JD: I got a job with the city of Detroit, which was a little interesting because at the time, I don’t know if you know this, they had a general entry level job for college graduates called Technical Aid. And at the time I applied, they were divided into Technical Aid Male and Technical Aid Female. The only difference was you had to pass the same test, but the females had to be able to type forty-five words a minute. So the first time I took the test I failed it because I can’t type. [Laughter] By the time I went to take it three months later when I was eligible again, they had taken away that requirement because the Civil Rights movement had started and they were trying to equalize all of the positions. Then I got the job with the city. I had worked for Wayne County several summers while I was in college. They hired me when I graduated, so I had a job with Wayne County until I got the job with the city.</p>
<p>BB: What’d you do with Wayne County?</p>
<p>JD: Oh, I had a number of different jobs. I worked for the road commission for a long time and in the summer I would relieve people in the accounting division who wanted to go on vacation. So they would teach me their job. I would do it for two weeks and then somebody else would teach me their job and I’d do that. That’s how I spent my summer.</p>
<p>BB: Wow, the Jackie-of-all-trades.</p>
<p>JD: Yeah, exactly. [Laughter]</p>
<p>BB: Interesting.</p>
<p>JD: I learned about a lot of Wayne County systems by doing that: the parks, and the airport, and everything that the county ran, highways.</p>
<p>BB: Tell me about your city position. What’d you do for the city of Detroit?</p>
<p>JD: Well, when I was hired in August of 1966, I was assigned to the housing department. I was sent to a field office on Grand River and Grand Boulevard. And we were relocating families from the right-of-way of the Jeffries and the Fisher freeways which were just being built.</p>
<p>BB: That’s right. Okay.</p>
<p>JD: I liked the job, but it involved a lot of social work. My parents were really concerned because I was so involved with some of the families that I was trying to relocate, that I’d be going down to the area at night and taking them food, and money, and blankets, and things they didn’t have. So they said you’ve got to find something else. The other thing was that all of the Edison people, the utility peoples, were all out there in pairs. And I was out there by myself, which my parents didn’t think was real safe. Although, I must say, all the people I worked with did a good job at protecting me, but there were a couple of minor incidents. I went down to the civil service commission and said I’d really like a transfer. They sent me to a couple of different offices. In February of ‘67, the police department had formed a research and development unit. Maybe sometime in ’65; it was pretty new. They were putting personnel in it. They were looking for people. They absolutely did not want a woman. They told me that.</p>
<p>BB: Really? How’d you get the job?</p>
<p>JD: Well, They got desperate [laughter].They had to have somebody. It was a little awkward at first because I say that I worked in the men’s locker room for 35 years. The atmosphere before civil rights and sexual harassment was just incredible. I mean I know young women like yourself find it hard to believe what some of us went through, but the office reported directly to the deputy superintendent of police. He was as much a male chauvinist as the rest of them, but they needed the help badly. And he knew I was going to Wayne at night to get a master’s. He was going to get his bachelor’s degree. And I think in a way he used to send me out to pick up his books or assignments and things like that.</p>
<p>BB: (laughing) Oh goodness.</p>
<p>JD: So I had a lot of interesting assignments at the beginning. The office answered his—it was a commissioner at the time, commissioner of police—all of his correspondence. So it could be very serious from a citizen complaining about something, to the commissioner saying to me, “Write my mother a Christmas letter.”</p>
<p>BB: Gotcha.</p>
<p>JD: We also – the police department operates on the system of general orders that are written. We wrote all those orders and kept track of them, and so forth. Also, at that time, the federal government began the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance and began giving out federal grants to police departments, and we wrote those grant applications. Detroit was probably one of the first five in the country to receive one if I recall correctly. We had people coming in from the police executive research forum and other research organizations. Detroit was a big city at the time. We had a fairly large force. I was once asked to figure out how many blacks were on the job and I think at the time I did it, it was about five percent of the force.</p>
<p>BB: Okay, because at one time, if I remember correctly, there was almost what, 5,300 police officers?</p>
<p>JD: Yes, exactly.</p>
<p>BB: Okay.</p>
<p>JD: And we were pretty modern. We had the first traffic lights here. We had a lot of firsts. There was interest in the department. I also did things like, made center pieces for the Women Who Work Luncheon when some woman from the women’s division was being honored.</p>
<p>BB: Aww.</p>
<p>JD: Things, little tasks. I never knew what the job was going to be on any given day, but it was very interesting. So I was able to learn a lot about how the department operated. You know, I certainly knew all of its rules and regulations because I wrote a lot of them. [Laughter] That’s about it.</p>
<p>BB: At that time in ‘67, you know ’64 when you received this position, how was the city? Had it changed from what you had perceived it when you were child growing up? Had it changed in any way beyond you know the civil rights movement? How was the feeling?</p>
<p>JD: People were starting to move out to suburbs, but not for any particular reason other than you could get a newer house. Some of the jobs were moving. They weren’t all downtown anymore. But, it was pretty much the same city that I grew up in, you know I don’t recall. Our neighborhood started to change a little bit. When we bought our house in 1952 on Manor, my father had to break a restrictive covenant that didn’t allow Jews. We were a Jewish family. Those were outlawed by the Supreme Court subsequently. My father had a case of one of his clients, Orsel McGhee, who lived on Seebaldt Street, who wanted to buy a house on Seebaldt. And my father broke a restricted covenant at that time to get him the house. That case became combined with the cases that Thurgood Marshall eventually argued before the Supreme Court that struck down those restrictive covenants. They’re still in deeds but they can’t be enforced.</p>
<p>BB: Wow, I never knew that. That’s amazing. Leading up to—</p>
<p>JD: So we were the first Jewish family or maybe the second Jewish family on our block.</p>
<p>BB: As I’ve done this project I have not heard of that. That’s amazing. Kudos to your father (laughing). So leading up to the summer of 1967, obviously there’s reports of more civil unrest. How did you perceive that summer and then how did you learn about the event of the blind pig?</p>
<p>JD: Well, I got a call on Sunday night. Must have be what, July 23, from my office, saying there’s been some disturbances. They weren’t sure whether they wanted me to come into work on Monday or not, but they would send a car because I took the bus to work. Usually a Hamilton bus or there was an Imperial Express that ran down James Couzens, what is now the extension of the Lodge Freeway; that wasn’t built yet. So I just waited to hear from them and they said come on in. I went in. The men in my office, the sworn officers, it was a combination. The only other woman was our secretary. They did not have her come in for a few days. But the sworn officers were detailed to the roof of police headquarters with rifles.</p>
<p>BB: Oh wow. What happened?</p>
<p>JD: So I was the only one in the office a lot of the time except for our boss. They asked me to start clipping articles, any newspaper magazine, anything I saw that mentioned what was going on, to cut it out, and then we had this huge scrap book. Big, like, art-size paper, and I pasted these articles on it. Finally it was put together in a book and I hope it’s in the Burton Historical collection.</p>
<p>BB: Okay.</p>
<p>JD: I’ve never looked for it, but I assume that’s where it went.</p>
<p>BB: When we received your notes, that’s one of the things were going to look for next.</p>
<p>JD: They did make smaller copies of it. They shrunk it at some point. I thought I had one but I don’t. Anyway, then I understood that there were fires and looting, and things going on. It wasn’t like I wasn’t affected by it. I realize now that I had to travel through it to get home. Went right through one of the areas, but it just wasn’t anything in my experience that there had been a Kercheval incident but the year before. It was quieted down pretty easily. I knew that an officer had gone into a blind pig and that’s what started things going, and I heard about some of the people I knew in headquarters going out to the scene to try to calm things down. They were standing on trucks in the middle of the street with bullhorns, trying to get people to go home and so forth. Somehow it just didn’t seem real to me until maybe day two or three when the Army showed up, and there were tanks downtown. I used to walk to Hudson’s or Crowley’s for lunch, and there were tanks sitting there. And I thought, “This is silly,” you know, “There’s nothing happening down here. What are they doing?” They were sleeping on cots in various offices in police headquarters. When they first arrived they had no place to put them. And another interesting thing that I remember is that people were bringing food down to headquarters because the officers were on long shifts. It never occurred to us in a million years not to eat it. It certainly would today but back then no. We just accepted it, thanked the people. So it was sort of normal in a way. I mean it was weird watching TV or listening to the radio. You knew what was happening in those areas, and I had worked for the housing commission in the part of that. And some of it was the old neighborhood where I grew up around Chicago Boulevard. But it just never seemed quite real and then things started to escalate. We had the incident at Reverend Franklin’s church. Aretha’s father’s church. And then the Algiers Motel. I was keeping track of how many casualties there were, and officers injured, and things like that. I had all kinds of statistics. I also had all the utilities, Edison, and the gas company, and AT&T were headquartered in our office. Getting updates on where we needed them to guard their own facilities, where we couldn’t handle. The department did what it could to guard their facilities, but they had to put people out. So, we were keeping them apprised of where incidents were occurring and what was happening. It seemed to kind of be contained maybe within a week or ten days.</p>
<p>BB: What was the atmosphere because you did work with cops and deputies? How was the atmosphere with them coming from the scene to the office? Did you hear anything in particular about what was going on from them or did you just get most of your information from news clippings and TV?</p>
<p>JD: Well you heard a lot of racial animus. Some of the black officers on the department were out trying to do what they could to help. Also, black council people and, church reverends, and so forth. Everybody was pitching in trying to help. We couldn’t quite understand and I couldn’t, why people would, if you want to protest something, and maybe the department had been. I don’t know, and of course it never happened to me. But I’m sure they were probably hard on black people. But, if you want to protest something, why burn your neighborhood down? Why hurt yourself? That’s why when people call it a rebellion; it’s hard for me to use that word. You know I know people were angry, but what do you gain by chasing all the merchants out of the city? People who’d run businesses in those areas for years, and just were burned out. It was unthinkable.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah it’s hard. That’s actually my next question. How do you do you perceive the event? Do you see it as a rebellion, do you see the civil unrest, or do you see it as a riot? How would you classify what happened?</p>
<p>JD: I think the Kercheval incident was probably civil unrest, but I think what we had got in July '67 was big enough to be a riot. It was kind of contained to one or two areas, but it was spreading pretty quickly. The police department didn’t seem to be able to stop it, so it was a good thing that we got the National Guard and the Army in here to help. I don’t even know if the department had enough, I mean the officers wore side arms. There might be a rifle in a scout car or two, but I don’t believe we had enough rifles to handle any major disturbances. And there were discussions I heard about you know, "Should we pull everybody back? Is it worth risking police officers, or must we be out there trying to arrest as many people as we could." The other thing was, they didn’t have place to put them. They were bringing them to the garage of police headquarters, which prior to that, I used to walk through to get into the building but they closed it off, took all the cars out of it, and they just had people down there. There were no bathrooms. I mean it was horrible. And finally, Judge George Crockett from recorders court, one of the first black judges, came over and started holding arraignments right in the garage because the people couldn’t get processed fast enough. I don’t remember how long that went on, but a good probably the first week at least. They just didn’t have place to put the people.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah I’ve heard of locations like Belle Isle was used, and I believe the fairgrounds were used so, I’m not surprised. That’s amazing.</p>
<p>JD: They were housing people every because they were just sweeping anybody who happened to be—I mean I guess you could be innocently walking down the street, although, I don’t know why you would be.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah (laughing).</p>
<p>JD: There were curfews and there just were areas where you wouldn’t go.</p>
<p>BB: You say you remember the National Guard and the Army coming in through, do you remember working with them at all, or seeing police officers work with them?</p>
<p>JD: Yeah, I know police officers worked with them. I did not have much to do with them. I was really sitting in an office answering phones and trying to get information from here and there and collate it and get it to the people who needed to have it.</p>
<p>BB: Gotcha.</p>
<p>JD: My office was on the second floor of police headquarters and the executive floor was three. So I would just run up and down the stairs all the time, taking stuff up and I’d see them, pass them in the corridor. But I didn’t have anything to do with them really.</p>
<p>BB: Gotcha, gotcha. So after the event and the days following, how did you perceive your neighborhood and Detroit in general after that, after the event happened?</p>
<p>JD: Nothing happened where we were. My parents had been wanting to sell our house. I think it was August or September of 67’, they were able to sell it and we moved down to the Jeffersonian. It never occurred to any of us to move outside the city. They wanted an apartment. They didn’t think I’d be with them that much longer I guess. Although, in those days if you were a single woman you just did not go out and get an apartment. So we moved to the Jeffersonian. It was a pretty much brand new building at the time. There were very few tenants. I could take the Jefferson bus down to work. So you know I still wasn’t noticing much. Some of the areas that were involved in the Kercheval incident, I would pass on the way to work. But, they’d gone pretty much back to normal. I mean, there were still houses in all those vacant lots that you see today. People took care of their property. They were cutting their lawns. Life was pretty normal for me.</p>
<p>BB: When would you say that things changed?</p>
<p>JD: I won’t say the election of Coleman Young. I think it was before that. Would it have been 1970, or ‘69? Richard Austin ran for mayor against Roman Gribbs. I was kind of a smart mouth, running around telling people that if you voted for Austin, we’d have a reasonably competent black mayor who could perhaps gain the trust of some of these citizens who didn’t trust the government any longer. I didn’t quite understand why they didn’t, but I mean I knew why. It’s just that it wasn’t in my personal experience. I understood their point of view. I lived in a pretty white world. And police headquarters was a very white world, and city government was too. Anyway, Roman Gribbs won. Things started to change during his administration. But Coleman Young’s election was a real flash point, I think. And I think if he had served for two terms, he would have been the greatest mayor Detroit ever had. He served too long. But when he came in he made everything half and half. If he appointed a black department director, then the deputy was white, and vice versa. He made some excellent appointments. He started really pushing the police department to integrate. Other departments too, but police particularly. And they needed pushing. You know, the civil rights laws helped because I don’t think without that the department would have ever—he could have done whatever he wanted to and they would have sat there and said, “Well you’ll be gone and we’ll be here.” They had their own little culture. You know, for the most part the policemen that I worked with were very good people. They wanted to help the community. They didn’t want a bad reputation. The ones I knew weren’t out there beating people up. I heard more, and more, and more about that as I went through my career, because in 1983, at that time I was in charge of the department’s budget, which was about 350 million dollars. I was getting bored. Michael and I were married. He came home one day and he said, he was in the personnel department, “You know you can’t do personnel work anymore without being a lawyer. And I said, “Well if you want to go to law school,” – I tried to go to law school when I graduated from U of M [University of Michigan]. They were only taking one or two women per class at that time. And I could not get in. My grades at U of M weren't that good. I just forgot about it. But when he said that we decided we would go to law school. We both worked our full time jobs and went to law school at night for four years at Wayne and got our law degrees. When I got my law degree, the department put me in their legal unit.</p>
<p>BB: Okay.</p>
<p>JD: There was a high turnover in the unit, so at some point I became the head of it.</p>
<p>BB: Wow.</p>
<p>JD: Just longevity.</p>
<p>(laughing)</p>
<p>BB: You stuck through. You stuck through.</p>
<p>JD: [Cough] As a lawyer for the department and looking at the procedures we had from a little different perspective, when I was writing them, I was writing them for efficiency of operation. We had lawyers review them of course, but there just weren't that many – We could pretty much do what we wanted. By the time I became a lawyer, there were so many statutes and restrictions. We had to check a million different things before we made a rule. [Coughing] And we didn't know if it would conflict.</p>
<p>BB: Okay, so you had gotten your law degree and you were working with the budget and doing more human resources. So after you got your law degree, what did you end up using it for in the department specifically?</p>
<p>JD: Well I worked in the legal advisor section, and we were responsible for reviewing all the orders to make sure they were legal. We taught the legal curriculum at the police academy.</p>
<p>BB: Okay.</p>
<p>JD: There's a big portion of the recruit training that's legal training, naturally. We're liaisons with the attorneys who are defending the cases against the police department.</p>
<p>BB: Okay. What had changed when you were brought on to review policies and things with police officers? What had changed while you were in that position either policy wise or other?</p>
<p>JD: There was a lot of, kind of what's happening now. A lot of protesting about the way police treated citizens, and wanting to make it less confrontational. I know when I taught at the academy [Coughing] they would laugh at me. [Coughing] But I would tell the officers, if you just practice this, "Please, sir, cooperate", instead of saying you know, "MF get down on the ground, assume the position" or whatever. But, like I said, they laughed at me. We had so many lawsuits being brought, and so many citizen complaints [Coughing], that were going to bankrupt the city, which they [Coughing] helped to do. I kept trying to advise people [Coughing], let's do it this way, not that way. [Coughing] I was sent by the department various times to places like New York and Chicago to study how they were doing things. They're trying to modernize, neutralize I guess [Coughing]. I'm going to get some more water. [Coughing] I don't want to make it sound like—I certainly empathized with members of the community. [Coughing] I knew about the amount of prejudice [Coughing] that there was. When I say it didn't affect my life, I did a lot of academic research [Coughing] into what had happened. The causes and so forth. So intellectually I understood it, but I still couldn't understand how burning down your own neighborhood accomplished anything.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, it's hard.</p>
<p>JD: And when you look at what's happened to Detroit. Now to my mind the, the worst thing, worse than the riot, was the threat of cross district bussing. L. Brooks Patterson was an attorney for a woman named Irene McCabe out in Pontiac. They were fighting the idea of cross district bussing. But that was the thing, when people thought that [Coughing] their kids [Coughing] were going to neighborhood schools with neighbors, that's one thing. But when you're taking white children and trying to integrate them into schools in the black neighborhood, it was a whole other story. I think that did more damage than anything. And probably, people were pretty predisposed to hate Coleman Young. [Coughing] He was, I think thought to be uppity, and he wasn't going to stand for anything. And he didn't. So he made a lot of changes but a lot of people's lives were affected and they didn't like it. I personally think the amount of racism was just, on both sides. Couldn't be overcome. Still hasn't.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, It's still prevalent for sure. Where do you see Detroit going? Well you’re still in the area, so [Laughing].</p>
<p>JD: I'm glad to see it's coming back. Nobody would like to see it come back more than me. [Coughing] I lived in Detroit for what, [Coughing] more than fifty years. I would still be there, but, we wanted a condo and we weren't able to find anything. Where we are now is about twelve blocks from where we lived in the city, and it didn't seem like I was crossing that big of a line. Although Grosse Pointe has its own connotations. But, the thing – I lived on East Outer Drive [Coughing]. We had our own neighborhood snow removal, neighborhood police patrol [Coughing]. The only thing you can't hire is EMS. And that's what started to scare us. We were getting up there and we thought if we need an ambulance [Coughing], we’re not going to be able to get it. Because we thought a lot about moving downtown, which we lived in when we first got married and we would love to do that. Maybe we will be able to again sometime, but, the services just weren't there. And we’re paying very high taxes. We don't have children so we didn't have the school problem.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah, but you have positive hopes for Detroit?</p>
<p>JD: I do, yes. It was a great city. It is a great city. [Coughing] It has a great history. My family’s been here more than a century. I'm pretty tied to it. Did everything I could, working for it to try to make it better. But there are a lot of other outside forces [Coughing]. Oh my god, it just won't quit.</p>
<p>BB: Yeah I know. Well I know I don't want to make you suffocate here. I know coughing kind of gets to you after a while. One last thing. Is there anything you would like to add that I didn't cover with you in regards to before, after, during, or any advice you have for the younger generation coming in hoping to make the city great again?</p>
<p>[Laughter]</p>
<p>JD: Well, I hope people can get along with each other better [Coughing]. I never understood the divisions. I wasn't brought up to them. I didn't know what the differences were. I always try to get along with everybody and I don't understand [Coughing] why we can't all get along. And maybe the younger generation didn't grow up with all this stuff that can bring it about. I think Mayor Duggan is doing a great job and working at it, but you know it's a working process. It's going to take a long time. I drive around the neighborhoods all the time. I'm in Detroit a lot. It's so sad. [Coughing] But I don't know, I'm sure I'll think of a million other things later.</p>
<p>BB: Well if you do think of anything else, you've got our email address. Please don't hesitate to email me again or give us a call. We can always add your written transcription to this. Because I know you're sick so I really don't want to [Laughing] bug you a little bit more. I really do appreciate you letting us come in and sit down with you guys and getting your story. We appreciate it.</p>
<p>JD: I'm pleased to do it.</p> **
Original Format
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Recording
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Bree Boettner
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Jackie DeYoung
Location
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Grosse Pointe, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aKRRlMM-M7M" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Jackie DeYoung, April 5th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, DeYoung discusses her experiences of the 1967 disturbance and how it affected her life. Additionally, she speaks about her 35 year career at the Detroit Police Department and how the department, and the city, operated and changed before, during, and after the 1967 disturbance.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Date
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05/24/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-US
Type
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Sound
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Curfew
Detroit Police Department
Government
Kercheval Incident
Mayor Coleman Young
Mumford High School
Public Servant
Tanks
University of Michigan
Wayne State University
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http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/ac8fbd79502963de2ce504e337d801d3.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
An audio or video resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Hubert Locke
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Hubert G. Locke was born April 1934 and grew up on the Old West Side of Detroit. Locke worked for the Wayne State Police Department in the years prior to 1967 and then worked for the Detroit Police Department during 1967.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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08/17/2016
Interview Length
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01:20:05
Transcriptionist
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Hannah Sabal
Transcription Date
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09/16/2016
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, today is August 17<sup>th</sup>, 2016. My name is William Winkel. I am in Detroit, Michigan. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with Mr. Hubert G. Locke. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>HL: Mr. Winkel, I’m happy to do so.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please tell me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>HL: I was born here in Detroit in 1934, April of ’34.</p>
<p>WW: What neighborhood did you grow up in?</p>
<p>HL: I grew up in what is known by black Detroiters as the Old West Side. The geographic area roughly served Northwestern High School; that was one of its major institutional anchor points. It was one of three segregated areas in the city of Detroit, in which black families could buy homes. That was its significance for me.</p>
<p>WW: What streets does that lie between?</p>
<p>HL: It’s bounded by Epworth on the west, by West Grand Boulevard on the east, by Tireman on the north, and by Warren on the south. In fact, the famed supreme court decision on restrictive covenance, which was the device used to maintain segregated housing in the city, and all across the nation for that matter, was decided by—or I should say one of the cases the court reviewed in reaching that decision involved the purchase of a home by a black family on Seebaldt. Seebaldt was just two streets over from Tireman. Tireman was the dividing line between black and white Detroit on the west side.</p>
<p>WW: Did you enjoy your time growing up there?</p>
<p>HL: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. In spite of the fact that it was segregated, it was a wonderful old community. Very much intact. Many of the large churches of black Detroit were there. Their pastors were famous throughout the city. Charles Hill was a Hartford Baptist, and Hill was sort of a perennial candidate for the city council. Never made it, but he ran faithfully year after year. Jesse J. McNeil was a Tabernacle. Father Dade, Malcolm Dade, was the priest at St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church. So it was a famed old community. In fact, one of the institutions was the Nacirema club, which had its own building at the corner of, I think, 30<sup>th</sup> and Milford; it may have been 28<sup>th</sup>. At any rate, Nacirema was one of the key social institutions of the old neighborhood. And Nacirema just happens to be “American” spelled backwards. It was the club’s way of not only enjoying its own existence, but thumbing its nose at the rest of society in the process.</p>
<p>WW: Growing up, did you tend to stay in your own neighborhood or did you—</p>
<p>HL: Oh, yes. Stayed in that circumference that I’ve just described. Yes, very much so. Went to elementary school at Wingart, which was on the Boulevard between Scoville, and, I think, Moorplace; went on to McMichael Intermediate School and Northwestern High.</p>
<p>WW: What was the reason you stayed within your neighborhood?</p>
<p>HL: There just wasn’t much enticement for going elsewhere. All my friends as I was growing up were in that neighborhood. We went to a church, as I recall, out of the community that was over on the east side, as a matter of fact. That was my parents’ church. Other than that, we simply didn’t have occasion to go outside of the neighborhood. Everything we wanted or needed or were interested in was in that area.</p>
<p>WW: The schools you went to growing up: they were in a predominantly black area? Were they also predominantly black?</p>
<p>HL: There were two elementary schools that served the area: Samson, which was located near Epworth, and Wingart—that is, Samson was in the far western end of the area. Wingart was right on the eastern boundary. Samson, I think, was entirely black, or certainly predominantly black. Wingart curiously had a orphanage across the street from the school. If I recall correctly, the orphanage was run by the Evangelical and Reform Church, which was then, at least, entirely white denomination. For some reason, although my recollection is poor here, we kids thought the orphanage, which was entirely filled with white youngsters—we thought those youngsters were German refugees, and this is during the second World War, of course. Now, that may have just been a myth that prevailed at the time, but certainly they were white. That integrated, if you will, Wingart Elementary. When I got to intermediate school, McMichael had a fair number of white youngsters. Then when I got to Northwestern—Northwestern was, I think it might have been predominantly white. If it wasn’t, it was about half and half. The ethnic make-up of Northwestern was a sizeable Jewish population, kids who lived up in the Dexter/12<sup>th</sup> Street/Collingwood area. It may not have gone as far as 12<sup>th</sup> Street, but it certainly encompassed Dexter. I can’t imagine now why that would have been, because this is getting very close to old Central High School, and Central was, I think, almost exclusively Jewish. But there was a large white gentile population of kids who came from out Grand River, going northwest out of Grand River. I just remember becoming aware of that when I got to Northwestern, but we didn’t have much interaction with those youngsters.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. Growing up, what did your father and mother do for a living?</p>
<p>HL: My dad worked his entire life after 1937 at Ford Motor Company, in the Open Hearth. My mother was a housewife until the Second World War, and she worked, I think, from ’41 to ’44, ’45—she worked at the old Excelo plant on Hamilton, at Oakland Boulevard.</p>
<p>WW: Do you have any memories from ’43? From the ’43 riot?</p>
<p>HL: No, no. I was 9 at the time. I just remember tension. I remember it being a very tense period, but there were no problems in our part of town, that is in the Old West Side. I don’t remember there being any problems over there. There might have been, Mr. Winkel, but I don’t remember any.</p>
<p>WW: Okay, not to worry. Growing up in Detroit in the ‘50s, did you begin to move out past your neighborhood and explore the city?</p>
<p>HL: Oh, yes, yes. When I went to college, of course, I went to Wayne State, so that was really my first sort of exposure to the wider city and culture. Although, I had a number of Jewish friends in Northwestern, Jewish friends in high school, and for that reason, I’d often go across the boundary, if you will, West Grand Boulevard, over in the—what’s the street I just mentioned?</p>
<p>WW: Collingwood?</p>
<p>HL: Well, yes, in that area. I’d go over there to visit friends, for some reason. But not much exploration beyond that. My growing up years and exposure to the city was pretty much exclusively in the Old West Side until I went off to college.</p>
<p>WW: When you did go into all-white areas, did you feel uncomfortable being there?</p>
<p>HL: I’m not sure that I gave it a great deal of thought. When I was going to the home of friends, there was no problem. Nor was it that frequent, I should hasten to say. There wasn’t a lot of tension that I can recall in the city in that period. One of the jobs I had—in fact, when I was in my growing up years—this started when I was still in—no, I guess I was in high school. Maybe intermediate school, but certainlyin high school. I worked in the local grocery store that was at the corner of Stanford and Tireman. The owner was white. It served both the black populace, who lived south of Tireman, and the white populace who lived north of Tireman. So I was hauling groceries in the white area every evening after school and especially on the weekends. I never had any problems. But I’m saying all of this in the context of life within a very segregated city. We didn’t have problems primarily because we lived by ourselves, had our own institutions and cultural exposures and opportunities, so there wasn’t any need to see much of the city. There were two movie theatres, I remember, in the old neighborhood. I don’t remember going downtown to the theatre until I was in my college years. I’m hoping I remember that correctly, but I certainly don’t remember any large exposure to downtown Detroit. We may have gone down shopping, of course, in those days. The old Curn (??) and Sam’s were sort of shopping haunts, but that’s all I can remember of that.</p>
<p>WW: You said going to Wayne State opened your eyes a little bit to the wider city. Would you like to expand on that?</p>
<p>HL: Let’s see, where to begin? Suddenly, I am being exposed not just to the university, but this whole cultural center area so that suddenly the world of the art museum opened up for me. I can’t recall the Historical Society being here in 1950. Maybe it was—</p>
<p>WW: I do believe we moved in right after that.</p>
<p>HL: Yeah. That would figure. It’s just the wider universe that this—and particularly the wider cultural universe—that this whole experience exposed me to, and I took to it quite eagerly. I was president of the freshman class in 1950. We’d take ski trips up to Grayling and Gaylord, Michigan, in the winters. It was a wonderful time for me. In fact, I later served on the staff at Wayne for a couple of years, and thought I’d never leave the boundaries of these six blocks.</p>
<p>WW: Did you become politically active after you went to school at Wayne State?</p>
<p>HL: Well, I was politically active during my time as an undergraduate at Wayne State. This was the McCarthy era, among other things. I remember we had all sorts of anti-McCarthy activities going on during that period. I participated. I can’t think very actively, but participated in the local politics, democratic politics. I really didn’t become politically active until after I had gone off to graduate school and returned to Detroit. I left in 1955, went to Chicago, took a degree there, and came back to Detroit in 1959. That was really the beginning of my period of political activity.</p>
<p>WW: When you left and came back, did you notice any new tension in the city, from being gone for so long?</p>
<p>HL: No. I was so close that I was back and forth, really, all the time, so I didn’t sense any—the city was booming , of course, in that period. The automotive companies were hiring all over the place. There just was not the occasion for a lot of tension in that period. At least as far as I can recall.</p>
<p>WW: What propelled you into political activism? Especially in 1959, when you came back?</p>
<p>HL: the only thing I can recall specifically, Mr. Winkel, is—I can’t specifically recall what the events were between my return to the city in 1959 and my becoming the executive director of what was known as the Citizen’s committee for Equal Opportunity, but except to say, and it was part of the growing effort in the city then to begin to deal with some of its racial problems and some of the spin-offs of that situation. There was a critical election in this town. The years I cannot recall, but they resulted in the dumping of the then-mayor—I think it was Louis Miriani—and his replacement by Jerry Cavanagh.</p>
<p>WW: ’62.</p>
<p>HL: Was that when it was?</p>
<p>WW: Yeah.</p>
<p>HL: All right. Then that’s the anchor part because Cavanagh came on board with the determination to try to do something about racial problems in the city. We were just beginning to get the spill-over effect of the desegregation of Detroit, so there was a lot of population movement throughout the city, and that was creating some pockets of tension as black families moved into previously all-white areas. The Citizens’ Committee was the idea of Walter Reuther, who called some of his colleagues together and said, “This business in the south, it’s going to come north, and we are not prepared in Detroit to deal with it, and we better get our act together before it does.” That led to the creation of what was euphemistically called the Bishop Emerick Committee for the Episcopal bishop who chaired it. I can’t recall how I got selected for that job, but I went to work for the Citizen’s Committee in 1961, I think it was. Maybe it was ’62, and stayed there for three years, until ’65. Then I went back to my post at Wayne State, was there ‘65/’66, and in ’66 went to the police department. That part I remember well.</p>
<p>WW: Before we get there, did you sense any growing tension throughout the ‘60s with the Civil Rights Movement in full-swing?</p>
<p>HL: Oh, yeah, yeah, things were heating up then, I think it’s safe to say, in Detroit. The defeat of Miriani was particularly critical in that regard because there had been a couple of very tragic assaults on white nurses coming down to the medical center. The press, of course, was making a big cry about that, and Miriani made it a huge part of his reelection campaign: he was going to get the rapists off the street. What he did, really, I think this is well-documented, was he announced what amounted to a crack-down on street crime, which of course meant a crack-down on black males, and the police department went after it with considerable eagerness so that any black male found walking in this area after dusk, in the evening, was going to be arrested. If not arrested, at least stopped, detained, patted-down, roughed-up, and that became an election issue in ’62. It was that issue that swung the black vote, in this town, at least, toward Jerry Cavanagh. Now did I answer the question you asked me?</p>
<p>WW: You did. How did you begin your work with the police department and Commissioner Girardin?</p>
<p>HL: That was a direct outcome of my work with the Citizens’ Committee. We had four major areas of concern in Bishop Emerick’s committee: There was education, housing, public accommodations, and police-community relations. Because of the tension, we spent either the greater majority of our time or maybe it was just because it was the most volatile area of the four, on police-community relations. I resigned in ’64, ’65, to go back to Wayne, and I got this call from the mayor who invites me to sit down with him and Ray Girardin, then the Commissioner of Police, and their pitch was, “Look. You and the Citizens’ Committee have focused so much time on the problem of police-community relations and you worked at it from the outside. We want you to come at it on the inside and help deal with it within the department,” to which I said politely, “Mr. Mayor, you’re out of your cotton-picking mind.” Who in his right mind would go in the Detroit Police Department, which had, at that time, a pretty bad reputation, as far as police-community relations were concerned? Well, Jerry Cavanagh was a very astute politician. He immediately turns around and calls—who was it? Dick Austin, who was politically active at that time. I think he had been a candidate for Secretary of State. John Conyers—I’m trying to think, I think Buddy Battle from the labor union. Anyway, he calls these guys together and he says, “Look you’ve been knocking my head about the police-community relations problem. I’m trying to get Locke to come in the department; we are creating a post for him to work on this problem.” I got called one evening—I will never forget—shortly thereafter to a meeting of the “Black Powers That Be,” it was in Dick Austin’s basement/recreation room. They said, “Look, we don’t know what Cavanagh is up to, but if he wants you to come inside the police department, you go.” So I went. I went, and I was there for two years. When I went in the department—maybe I’m getting ahead of the story—when I went in the department, there were 137 or 139 black officers in a department that had 4,000 sworn officers. Needless to say, those 130+ black officers were all in the patrol ranks, but there were two exceptions that I remember: George [unintelligible] had risen to the level of precinct captain, and Bill Hart, who later became the chief of police was in the vice squad. Those were the two I can remember most clearly. At any rate, that’s the story of how I got into the PD.</p>
<p>WW: What work did you start doing in ’66, when you first started?</p>
<p>HL: I began with the most obvious problems, one being the low number of black officers in the department, and just began to look at it systematically from the whole recruitment process, all the way through the exam, testing, you know. All up to swearing in. What I discovered was that the medical officer for the department—start this over again. What I discovered was that a number of young black males were going to the department and filling out applications and were able to pass the initial screening exam, where they weeded out people with criminal records, etc. Passed—I think there was a written exam, I’m sure there was at that point—passed that but got to the medical exam, of all things, and were flunking it. When I go to the medical office to see what the problem is, the doctor said, “Oh, it’s very simple. Blacks have flat feet and they can’t do patrol.” I said, “But nobody walks the patrol beat anymore! They ride around in scout cars!” But believe it or not, he was using that as an excuse to keep the number of—I’m sure with some encouragement and complicity by others of the department. I went back and told the commissioner what I’d found. He almost tore his hair out, but put a stop to that immediately. He said to me, I will never forget, “Hubert, if we were functioning at our ideally in this whole recruitment process, what do you think we’d be taking in in each entry class?” I said, “Well, city’s population is now close to 25% black, so if we’re going to reflect the population of the city, we ought to have entrance classes that are approximately 25% black officers.” He sent that word to the recruitment office and said, “I want to set that as a target.” Do you know, from that next class on, we were taking in exactly 25%! Exactly 25%, and did so up until the time I left the department. It was that kind of problem, though, that we worked on. There was a problem of assignment and promotion in the department, I had to work on that. We set up police-community relations councils in each of the precincts. We were making some small but sort of steady progress, chipping away at what had been a huge, glacial problem in the city.</p>
<p>WW: What was the reputation—when you say the police department had a bad reputation, do you mean just in the black community, or in the white community as well?</p>
<p>HL: No, in the black community. I don’t know that the white community was unhappy with the police department, but it certainly had a bad reputation in black Detroit. Just as a small note on that one, there was, in those days, part of the patrol tactic was to have in each precinct what was known as the felony car. The felony car was euphemistically known in the community as The Big Four, because it was an unmarked police car, usually a big Buick or something, in which four officers rode around who handled the felony runs in each precinct. This inevitably brought them into direct contact and conflict with a lot of young black males as they would make street stops and whatever. I remember that in those first few months in the department, I developed the habit of riding in one of those felony cars every Friday and Saturday night. Friday, I’d work from eight to five, get a bite to eat, and come back and go out with the felony car and ride ‘til three in the morning. I think those were the hours. But knowing, as I said to confidantes, knowing that at least the felony car in which I was riding wasn’t going to have any bad stories about police conduct. Just stuff like that, we were trying to work away at it.</p>
<p>WW: Going throughout 1966, as you’re continuing to work at this post, do you believe that police-community relations were improving?</p>
<p>HL: Mr. Winkel, I really can’t answer that. I suppose the answer you would get to that question depends on who you ask. I think some felt there was some small, or at least things were turning around, they were heading in the right direction. Others would probably say, no, nothing changed at all. I tend to think, for whatever it’s worth, that there was at least movement. Things were not in a static mode during that period. Of course, we’re talking about ’66. I went in the department in March of ’66. Fifteen months later, the riot erupts, so we didn’t have much time to make a lot of progress.</p>
<p>WW: Were you in the department when the Kercheval incident happened in ’66?</p>
<p>HL: Yes, yes, yes, I was, indeed. We gained a lot of credit on our handling of the Kercheval incident, because the rest of the nation was blowing up at that point. Newark had just occurred, if I recall correctly, and then suddenly, we think it’s our turn, but we had two or three things going for us that night. One, it happened on a Tuesday night, and if I recall correctly, there may have been a baseball game in town that night. For some reason, there was a higher than normal contingent of officers on duty downtown. So when we got the alert, shipping them up to Kercheval wasn’t much of a problem. We had that area isolated and contained within fifteen, twenty minutes, if I recall correctly. Number two, the guys who were behind the Kercheval incident—I won’t mention names at this point—but they were very good [unintelligible], they weren’t the best planners in the world. So whatever they had in mind, getting stirred up, didn’t stir up very easily. But the third thing I will never forget is that at about nine or ten o’clock that night, a rainstorm—like the one we just had a couple of nights ago—broke out, and that put a damper on Kercheval. Wiped out the protest completely. And Detroit, suddenly, began to gain the reputation nation-wide as the city who knows how to handle civil disorders. I remember that distinctly. Particularly because in July ’67, what happened was the exact opposite of what had happened at the Kercheval incident. We had—I’ll get my numbers mixed up, at this point—but the number of officers who were on-duty at four o’clock on Sunday morning—</p>
<p>WW: It was about three hundred.</p>
<p>HL: There you are. I know it’s the lowest point at which the city’s ever staffed for good and historic reasons. We never got on top of it from the beginning.</p>
<p>WW: After that incident, what was the atmosphere in the police department? Was it tense because the incident had occurred? Or was there relief that the incident was taken care of so quickly?</p>
<p>HL: The Kercheval incident?</p>
<p>WW: Yeah.</p>
<p>HL: The officers were rather pleased with themselves, having handled Kercheval, particularly because of the growing problem nationally. They really thought that they had done something extraordinary. I remember that period as one in which the officers said, maybe there is something to this police-community relations business. I can remember now, I’m sorry, I can remember now what it was that was the bridge between my coming back here and the Citizens’ Committee. The city got a grant from some federal agency to do police-community relations training and to put the whole of the department, if I remember correctly, through ten, fifteen hours of [unintelligible] relations, and I was one of—I can’t remember who else was involved—what one of the chaps tapped to do that, that’s what it was.</p>
<p>WW: Very nice. Going into ’67, what was your focus in your job then? I know it’s still police-community relations but what projects were you working in within the department?</p>
<p>HL: Well, if I recall correctly, I was then being asked to troubleshoot any number of things in the department, not all of which had to do with police-community relations. When I first went in, in fact, it was a month or two after the discovery of the infamous Little Black Book. There was a grand jury at work in Detroit looking into the question of police corruption. It was headed by Edward—I think his name was Edward Piggins, who himself was a former police chief, but now was on the circuit court bench. He was heading this grand jury investigation into corruption in the department. They discovered down in Greektown, on a raid in one of the restaurants down there that was owned by a couple of guys whose reputations, at least, would lead one to believe that they were part of the downtown mafia. They discovered a little black book in the office of the restaurant manager that had the names of what appeared to be a number of police officers, up to and including the deputy superintendent and amounts written beside them, dollar amounts. On further investigation, did confirm that this was part of a pay-off scheme that was meant to buy protection for what I think I recall was a fairly extensive gambling network downtown. I remember having to sit on a trial, what did we call it? The police trial board? Something of that sort as these officers were brought in, formally charged, and we had to work through those cases. I was doing other things in the department, in addition to the police-community relations stuff.</p>
<p>WW: When was this book discovered? ’66 or ’67?</p>
<p>HL: ’66. February or March of ’66. That investigation continued, as well as these trial boards, if I recall correctly, through most of my tenure in the department, through ’66 and ’67, because the deputy chief, who was the highest one caught in the net, resigned. I don’t think he was canned, but given the option of resigning, and that was in early ’67 if I recall correctly.</p>
<p>WW: Going into the summer of ’67, what was the atmosphere like in the police department? Was the department anticipating another incident?</p>
<p>HL: It was, it was anticipating trouble. I can’t say that we were caught unawares. One of the incidents I remember particularly: I was out riding, again, with the Big Four on the weekend before July 23<sup>rd</sup>, the weekend prior to the outbreak of the riot. We raided a blind pig, or busted is the more appropriate term—busted a blind pig on Linwood, Linwood and, I think the cross street may have been Collingwood or Lawrence, somewhere there in the area between the Boulevard and Davison, on Linwood. The technique, of course, was for the vice squad to go, hit the place about two or three in the morning, arrest the people who were there, and take them on downtown for booking. We found, for some reason, we expected only to find only a dozen or twenty people in the place. There were seventy or eighty people, and we had difficulty getting transportation for getting these people from the point of arrest downtown. I remember going back to headquarters that Monday and saying, “We gotta work out a different way of handling this. We can’t bust these places if we don’t know that we are going to have ready and available enough transportation to get them downtown.” Because the bust itself, of course, was a big excitement in the community; people would gather, pimps would try to agitate the crowd because some of their girls were being locked up in the whole process. Just that week, we began this process of trying to improve the coordination between the vice squad and whomever was to be called to provide transportation to get people out.</p>
<p>WW: Just in time.</p>
<p>HL: Just in time, yeah. A week later, what happens, but it repeats! The whole scenario repeats itself the whole business again.</p>
<p>WW: How did you first hear about what was going on that next week? When did you first hear about the raid on the blind pig?</p>
<p>HL: In fact, I can state that with some precision because I wrote that up in a little book that I did on the Detroit riot. It refreshed my memory. Nick Hood, who was the pastor at Plymouth Congregation, called me. I can’t remember how that came about, but he called me early Sunday morning. I guess he was getting ready for his pastoral duties, and within minutes thereafter—it may have been almost at the same time—I get a call from Conrad Mallet. Conrad was the assistant to Cavanagh and was my next-door neighbor, and his son, Conrad, Jr., was the neighborhood paperboy. He had gone up on 12<sup>th</sup> Street to pick up his supply of papers from wherever the drop was, came home wide-eyed as could be and said to his dad, “Something’s going on up on 12<sup>th</sup> Street.” Conrad calls me, I hop in my car, because we lived at Austin between 12<sup>th</sup> and 14<sup>th</sup>, so it was a matter of four blocks for me to drive up there and see what’s going on. I called headquarters, and they were just beginning to get alerts as to something going on. That’s very well stuck in my mind.</p>
<p>WW: What did you do after that?</p>
<p>HL: I went directly to headquarters, after I got in the car and saw what was going on. I went to headquarters. I do have to inject a personal note, at this point, because I was a working pastor in this town, while all of this is going on, I was also serving a small congregation out in the Conant Gardens area. When I left home that morning to go up on 12<sup>th</sup> Street to see what was going on, I threw my vestments in the back of my police car, thinking that we’d have another Kercheval, that a couple hours and we’d be on top of it, and I could go on and conduct the two services that I normally did on Sunday morning. I didn’t get back home—I left home on Sunday, I think it was about four o’clock in the morning—I didn’t get back home until Tuesday night. Didn’t get any sleep or bathed or washed my face, as I can recall, until Tuesday evening. From then on, it was just one thing after another in the department, trying to get on top of this. My first response was to call Arthur Johnson, who was then head of the NAACP, and John Conyers, alerted them, and we agreed to meet at—oh, I can’t think of the name of the church—it’s the Episcopal church at 12<sup>th</sup> and Virginia Park. It’s rector I remember very well, because he and I were very good friends: Bob Potts, Robert, the Reverend Robert Potts. We met there and both Art and John were going to try to appeal to the crowd. I had some bullhorns brought up from headquarters. We got in the back of a convertible and John and Art are going down 12<sup>th</sup> Street, urging people to cool it and get off the streets, etc. People were shouting back at them, it was clear they weren’t in the mood. That was where, Mr. Winkel, we found the first tactical problem that we had. One of the problems we immediately had on 12<sup>th</sup> Street was in trying to disperse the crowd, the officers formed a V formation, a wedge, and would move up 12<sup>th</sup> Street block by block, trying to clear it, but at each cross street, the crowd would simply swarm around behind the commercial establishments on 12<sup>th</sup> Street, go down the alley that paralleled 12<sup>th</sup> Street, and come up behind the officers, pelting them with anything they could lay their hands on. That technique just proved to be fruitless and we abandoned it early on. At that point, just tried to contain the area. I recall us trying to get a cordon around, I think it was Linwood and Woodrow Wilson, the Boulevard and Clairmount to see if we could just contain the crowds, keep other people from flowing into the mix. But they began to set fires very rapidly at this point, not only on 12<sup>th</sup> Street, but over on Linwood and, I think, by Grand River; early, by noon or so, we had fires burning there. It was just chaos, impossible to get a hold of.</p>
<p>WW: Early Sunday morning, how quickly was the police department able to call back its officers?</p>
<p>HL: Not very. Not very fast at all, because as you point out, there were three hundred people on duty that morning, but most of the officers, good Catholics that they were, were either at mass or they were up at their cottages or cabins, wherever they had them, etc. So the call-up just proceeded very slowly. I should be able to remember numbers, and I suspect they’re in my book, but I remember by noon we still had only five or six hundred officers who had reported for duty. That didn’t go well either.</p>
<p>WW: Mayor Cavanagh’s decision to implement a no-shoot order with the police department—how do you think that affected what was going on on 12<sup>th</sup> Street?</p>
<p>HL: How should I answer that? I can answer that only in historical, only in the perspective of current police-citizen problems in the country. If the shooting of one black civilian by a police officer can set off incidents such as occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere, up in Minnesota, etc., you can imagine what would have happened if officers had been allowed to use their weapons in that crowded situation. It would have been a bloodbath, I’m sure. Absolutely sure. The department, the officers in the department, any number of officers in the department—that’s a more accurate way to put it—deeply resented that order. But I certainly applaud him for making it and I think it was absolutely the right thing to do, without question.</p>
<p>WW: When you arrived at the police department early that Sunday morning, what was the mood? Was it chaotic? Or was there a sense that the department was going to repeat Kercheval?</p>
<p>HL: It was fairly efficient. There are a number of things the department immediately goes into, attack or command mode, in a situation like this. As I recall the prevailing attitude, it was that we’ve got another Kercheval on our hands and we’ll get on top of it. But I think that rapidly dissipated, Mr. Winkel, as we found such things as our tactics weren’t working and that the call-up wasn’t going as it ought to. At least later that Sunday, after the problem of fires broke out, and sniper fire, we knew we had a different situation on our hands.</p>
<p>WW: At what point did the police department begin to seriously consider having the National Guard come in?</p>
<p>HL: Early on, very early on. If I recall correctly, that was sometime Sunday afternoon that we had already called the governor who dispatched state patrolman, who came up. We were asking for the National Guard as well. I’m sorry, I can’t remember the exact time as well, timeframe for these decisions, but I do remember that after dusk that evening, going up on the rooftop of 1300 Beaubien, police headquarters, looking out over the city and just seeing fires raging in all parts of the city, in the west, out east, as well as along 12<sup>th</sup> Street. I knew that we’d lost it at that point. I think everybody else knew that, in the department, certainly the command staff in the department did. We began to talk about federal troops, at that point. I forget when the request—this is all part of the official record, of course—when the request for federal troops was made, but I remember the politics surrounding that situation. They were sent in, the troops were sent in, but the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne were stationed at Selfridge field, up in Mt. Clements. Lyndon Johnson, then president, had sent as his embassary, deputy for the occasion, Silas Vance, who later became somebody’s secretary of state. Vance was under specific orders not to release those troops until Romney, who was then governor, had made a public acknowledgement that the situation was more than he could deal with. I can remember the back and forth in the department between Vance and Romney and Cavanagh, all trying to get those troops released. It was, what, late Monday, I think, before that finally occurred? Yeah.</p>
<p>WW: How did the police department feel when the National Guard did move in?</p>
<p>HL: They were grateful. There may have been a few yahoos in the department, I’m sure there were, who were convinced that if the mayor lifted his no-shoot ban they could get the thing controlled within minutes, but that was not the outlook nor the response of any sensible person in the department at the time. They wanted as much help as they could get, as early on as we could get it.</p>
<p>WW: When the federal troops finally moved in, was there a sense of relief as in, this might soon be over?</p>
<p>HL: There was a sense of relief, that’s for sure. As to how soon that might occur, I think it was still anybody’s guess. The troops represented a massive presence, with tanks rolling down the streets, etc. I think there were tanks on the streets. If I remember, the federal troops were exclusively assigned to the east side of the city. I can’t remember why that was.</p>
<p>WW: The federal troops took the east side and the National Guard took the west.</p>
<p>HL: Then I do recall correctly.</p>
<p>WW: But then the federal troops did move west.</p>
<p>HL: They did eventually move west? Okay. That part I couldn’t recall.</p>
<p>WW: You said the Detroit Police Department was planning or expecting something? Were you expecting anything on this scale?</p>
<p>HL: No! We would have asked for federal troops at four a.m. Sunday morning if we thought that anything of this scale… Again, as you’ve astutely discerned, we were just laboring under the impression that we had another Kercheval incident on our hands. I recall that as being distinctly being the mood of the department.</p>
<p>WW: Do you believe that the Detroit Police Department had the proper training they needed to handle something like this?</p>
<p>HL: Well, we’re talking about 1967. I don’t think policing has become that much more sophisticated in the past fifty years, as a matter of fact. I think current events prove that, for the most part. The tactics are still, as we saw in Milwaukee a couple of nights ago: When you’ve got a disturbance of this type, you try to contain the area and arrest, if you can, the ringleaders, if they’re obvious, or at least the most rambunctious, whether they’re the ringleaders or not, and to move in community leaders, particularly clergy, well-known politicians or others, to encourage people to get off the streets. That’s what they did two nights ago in Milwaukee, and that’s what we did fifty years ago in Detroit, only Milwaukee was small enough that it worked and in our case it was just out of hand from the get-go, as they say.</p>
<p>WW: How was the police department’s relationship with the National Guard?</p>
<p>HL: That was tense because the National Guard, of course, were these 18, 19-year-old kids from Muskegon and Cass City and Gaylord, lord knows where else. Probably, in many instances, it was the first time they had been in Detroit, let alone had faced something of this sort. So they were nervous as hell. The men in the department, I think, were both grateful for their presence but skittish about their behavior because you didn’t know whether these young kids would be racking their rifles and think they were shooting at a sniper but end up hitting a civilian. I think the department had really mixed feelings about their presence, but certainly by Monday night, the fact that we had both state police, National Guard, and, if I remember correctly after about ten o’clock that night, the federal troops on the street was an event of great relief to us all.</p>
<p>WW: From the perspective of the police department, how long did you stay in “riot mode,” before normal shifts were restored?</p>
<p>HL: I think it was the following Sunday before the alert was called off. I can’t remember that specifically.</p>
<p>WW: For you, you said you were on duty until that Tuesday.</p>
<p>HL: Oh, yeah, that’s only because I just took off—I was ready to drop—I just took off and went home for four hours. I think I snatched four hours’ worth of sleep, took a shower, but went right back to headquarters, was there certainly up through that following Sunday. A quick side note: I had that May, I think it was, May or June, I had indicated to Commissioner Girardin that I had had enough and wanted to go back to Wayne, and he said, at the time, “Look, Hubert, we’re expecting trouble this summer. Would you stay on at least during the summer months?” And I said, “Okay, I’ll stay through August. Let me get back for the fall term.” So I was anticipating going back and, more importantly, the department was anticipating problems, so anyone who suggested we were somehow caught by surprise or caught with our pants down or whatever just does not know what the inside—what the atmosphere internally was.</p>
<p>WW: After the event calmed down, how did the police department respond? Was there bitterness? Was there relief? What was the atmosphere like?</p>
<p>HL: I really can’t answer that, Mr. Winkel, because I did leave a month after. I left at the end of August. I really don’t know. Much of the attention then had turned to the three officers who were arrested in the Algiers Motel. I think it was two officers and a National Guardsman, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>WW: Nope.</p>
<p>HL: Or three officers? Three officers, okay.</p>
<p>WW: During that week, did you have any interaction with that case?</p>
<p>HL: Yes. Let’s see how much of this I can tell. The incident itself was on a Wednesday or a Thursday—Wednesday. Thursday, I got a call from Nate Conyers who Mr. Bury mentioned. My oldest buddy who was then a young attorney at offices in the Guardian Building. He called me at headquarters and said, “Locke, I’ve got two women here in my office who just told me a story that if it’s half true suggests you got a real problem in the department.” I left my desk, drove over to the Guardian Building; interviewed the two women who were at the motel, in the motel when all this took place; came back to police headquarters; reported what I had heard to the commissioner, who immediately called Vince Piersante, chief of detectives with orders to find out what had gone on. Vince, I remember, called George Bloomfield, I think that’s his las name, who was the retired head of the homicide bureau and assigned him to go after them. Bloomfield came back within days, I recall. Maybe a week, very short period of time. In effect gave the commissioner and Piersante the information and the evidence that led to the indictment of those men for first degree murder. I think, Mr. Winkel—I may be wrong—but I think to this day that’s still the only case of a police shooting in the nation which has resulted in indictment for first degree murder of a police officer. Clearly the department at that point had not lost its moral compass and was seriously anxious to get on top of it.</p>
<p>WW: Are there any other things you’d like to share from your time in the department?</p>
<p>HL: Only one. It’s been bouncing around the back of my head. There’s still a lot of rhetoric surrounding the incident. Many people have been on my case, and critically so, for calling it a riot. There are those who’d prefer to call it civil disorder, which I think is more neutral, though many more who prefer to call it an uprising or rebellion or all sorts of other descriptors, that I find questionable, quite frankly, but they’re entitled to their interpretation, political interpretation, if you will. The one thing I insist on is that it was not a race riot. It was not a race riot. I gather you’ve heard that before, yeah? Well, let me just join hands with you, then, in declaring that to be totally inaccurate. What happened in this city in 1942, or ’43, in 1943, was a race riot. I mean, black men were being yanked off Woodward street cars and being beaten in the street, etc. But I’ve got photos in 1967 of looting going on along Linwood. Two guys walking down the street carrying a huge sofa. Two black guys in front, two white guys behind. I declare it to be one of the most integrated events we’d had in this city, up until that time. The snipers whom we arrested—we didn’t arrest a lot of them, but the ones we did arrest were white. It was just a very mixed affair, sir. I made the point, to describe it as a race riot is just fundamentally and historically inaccurate.</p>
<p>WW: I’m really happy you brought that up because I forgot to ask that question. When you went back to Wayne in the fall, what was the mood of the student population? Do you think there was increased activism afterwards?</p>
<p>HL: I can’t really say that I recall with any honesty. I left the city two years later in a sort of fit of moral depression, I guess is the way to put it, because the Sunday after the riot—the Monday after the riot week, the Detroit Free Press came out with a front page story, and as I recall, a picture—a six or seven-column picture—of Henry Ford getting out in front of his chauffeur-driven limousine, getting out in front of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, Al Cleage’s church, and the bulk of the story was that Ford was now going to sit down and negotiate with the new black leadership in town. Al, I know, was making a lot of noise about the establishment having dealt with the likes of Art Johnson and John Conyers, etc. but that they had best start dealing with those who were the real leadership in the black community. That just resulted in a whole-scale shift in this town. Its power brokers then did start to deal with Cleage and a few others of that ilk. I thought, well, if that’s the way the city’s going, at least they can do it without my little help, and I packed up and got out. Took me two years to do so, but I did. And I guess that’s where the story ends.</p>
<p>WW: Why do you keep coming back?</p>
<p>HL: Why do I keep coming back now?</p>
<p>WW: Is it just to visit?</p>
<p>HL: No, I still have family here. My two sisters live—one in Ypsilanti and the other in Southfield, and we still have the old family place up in [unintelligible], a community of which I assume you’ve heard. Really, this time was making a pilgrimage back to [unintelligible]. I still have very dear friends here. I come back to see them every once in a while. My heart, I must admit, my heart is still here. This town was very good to me, and as I said at the outset of the interview, I thought I’d never leave Detroit. Detroit was the center of the universe, but I’ve wandered a good distance since then, that’s for sure.</p>
<p>WW: Is there anything else you’d like to share before we finish up?</p>
<p>HL: I can’t think of anything else.</p>
<p>WW: All right, then, thank you so much for taking time out of your day and have a safe trip back.</p>
<p>HL: Thank you, thank you for your probing questions.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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1hr 20min
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Hubert Locke
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wcjGMVH9MRs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Hubert Locke, August 17th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Locke discusses working his work at the Detroit Police Department during 1967. He also describes the tension between government and the department, along with frustration between citizens and the Detroit Police Department. Locke also tells about the actions of the Citizens’ Committee.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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09/16/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Blind Pig
Detroit Police Department
John Conyers
Kercheval Incident
Linwood Street
Mayor Jerome Cavanagh
The Big Four
Twelfth Street
Wayne State University
-
http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/bab4ae0d735186345de0bed07b228453.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Karl Mantyla
Brief Biography
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Karl Mantyla was born in Detroit in 1937. He worked for the Associated Press and several other newspapers.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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09/09/2016
Interview Length
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00:30:59
Transcriptionist
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Robert Lazich
Transcription Date
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10/28/2016
Transcription
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<p>William Winkle: Hello, today is September 9, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project. I am sitting down with Mr. Karl Mantyla. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Karl Mantyla: You’re welcome. It’s a pleasure.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Can you start by telling me when and where were you born?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I was born in old Grace Hospital in Detroit, June 18, 1938. I’ve been either, for the most part, close to Detroit or a resident of Detroit for many of the years following that time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Growing up in the city, what neighborhood did you live in?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I lived in several. I lived in the Dexter-Davidson area on Clement Street. The house is no longer there; it's a vacant lot. I lived on Longfellow Street, again in the same area. I lived on Mettetal Street. I went to grade school there. That was near Plymouth Road and Greenfield on the northwest side. Far north side. I lived on Brentwood for close to seven years. I also had a house for a period of time on Maryland Street in the Warren and Alter Road area. Then I associated Detroit with members of my family for a good long time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Growing up, the neighborhoods you lived in, were they integrated neighborhoods?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: They were not. They were primarily white neighborhoods. My first family consisted of myself, my wife then, and four children. The children were raised with white friends for the most part. Later on the neighborhood began changing to Chaldean and then to African-American.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Growing up in the city, what schools did you go to?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I went to the elementary school that serves the Clement Street area – the grade school, I should say; the elementary school that served the Plymouth Road-Greenfield area near Mettetal Street. Other than that, I was in school in later grades in Waterford Township and graduated eventually from Waterford High School. Attended several primarily all white schools: Waterford, from which I graduated in 1956; Sturgis High School; Petoskey High School; and Royal Oak High School for a short period of time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Moving around a little bit.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I did, yes. There was a divorce between my mother and father and my mother moved frequently in search of better and better jobs. I moved with her.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: After you graduated high school, did you stay in the area?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I stayed, generally speaking, in the area with the exception of when I was employed by the <em>Detroit Times</em>. The newspaper went out of business in 1960 and then I left Detroit for a couple of years to work as a bureau chief for the <em>Akron Beacon Journal</em> in Akron, Ohio, then after that returned to Detroit for seven-and-a half years. I was working at the Associated Press as a newsman and journalist and editor. From Associated Press I went to the United Auto Workers Union in their publications department, public relations department, and their local license department. I worked there for over 30 years until I retired in 1998.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: In the 1950s and early Sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I did not witness any personally but I certainly heard of a good amount of tension and heard of it, including from members of my own family. We moved from one part of the city to a more suburban part of the city and eventually moved out of town to the suburbs. Actually, I think there were a total of six or seven of my relatives who eventually moved away from the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Do you know why they did?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I think they were primarily part of the “white flight” that left the city. Unfortunately, when I chose to come back to the city and purchase a home on Maryland Street in the Warren and Alter Road area, that house had one buyer after me and then it was bulldozed into the basement. [Berg strippers ?] went in first. The neighborhood had changed there. They changed from working class home ownership primarily neighborhood, to one of rentals. A lot of people left and used their properties as rentals. We began noticing fewer and fewer residents who were the original residents and bought and paid for their own homes and eventually I joined that flight myself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: What year did you leave the city?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I have a little difficulty remembering exactly when that was.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Okay, not to worry. When you came back to work for the Associated Press, what was your job with the Associated Press?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I was a newsman journalist, often called “general assignment.” Also was an editor, a real editor, edited the copy that was furnished to broadcast stations. I worked there from 1962 until late-1969.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Going into the summer of ’67, had you seen any signs that something was coming?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: Yes, I had. The 1967 riot was actually one of three riots that occurred in the city. The first one was a mini-riot. It was in 1966 on Kercheval on the lower east side. The big one, as it was called, the one in which so many people were killed, was in 1967. There was a riot the summer following that, the World Series year, when the Detroit Tigers faced the St. Louis Cardinals. You may remember some of the names of the players that were associated with the World Series champion Tigers: Mickey Lolich was a pitcher; Denny McLane was a pitcher; there were others as well – all well known names from that period. There was a riot at the same time as the series was going on in the summer of 1968. In the 1966 mini-riot on Kercheval, I was at one point surrounded by a mob. But, the mob was primarily black. I was there as a newsman asking questions about their motivations. At that time I finally had to talk my way out of the group and rejoin the police officers. In other words, join again for safety sake. Because the mob started — members gathered to see what was going on. They began jive talking me. It wasn’t making any sense. My questions wasn’t getting any answers that I sought. At that point, I realized I was in a precarious situation. I talked my way out of it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Going into the following summer, were you anticipating another event?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I was not surprised when one occurred. The precipitating event was supposedly they arrested several men at a blind pig. It quickly spread to the streets and it lasted through contrasting administrations with each, as widely surmised, with each intending to embarrass the other one into showing that they could not control the situation at hand. The governor at the time was a Republican, George Romney. It was widely opinionated that Mr. Romney sought to hold back on the state police, and eventually the National Guard, in order to embarrass a politically active Democratic mayor of Detroit, Jerome Cavanagh. It was similarly suspected of the president at the time, Lyndon Johnson, he was to show that Romney and the National Guard and the state police could not control the situation. In other words, the ’67 riot grew beyond the abilities of these two law enforcement branches to control it. It was only when the Third Army was ordered in by Lyndon Johnson – the divisions of that were the 101st Division and the 82nd Airborne Division — that the city was essentially buttoned up and controlled. The National Guard was pretty wild, I thought anyway. I witnessed National Guardsmen with .50 caliber heavy weaponry — .50 caliber machine guns — mounted on trucks that were used to shoot out streetlights. They shot out streetlights in order to conceal themselves in the darkness. They were afraid of being subjected to lighting from outside where “snipers” could take advantage of them, could attack then. There are few reporters living today – if any, besides myself – who covered the riots in general in 1967. And there are no reporters, other than myself, who covered the Algiers Motel incident.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>There were three reporters that covered the Algiers Motel: there was myself, there was Joe Strickland from the <em>Detroit News</em>, and Lev Newman from the <em>Detroit Free Press</em>. Strickland died a couple of years afterwards, after he’d gone to work for the <em>Philadelphia Inquirer</em>. Lev Newman eventually moved to California. He taught journalism there for a while and then guest-lectured at some of his journalism classes at Wayne State University. He died in the 1970s or 1980s in California. So, I’m the survivor; I’m the last one. The only one.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Backtracking a little bit, how did you first hear what was going on on Twelfth Street?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: Like most newsgathering organizations, we had connections with the police through police reporters. I don’t know exactly whether the A.P. learned of it from police reporters from the <em>News</em> and the <em>Free Press </em>or otherwise. But they found out very quickly that crowds were gathering and beginning to loot.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: What was your first assignment that week? After you found out what was going on, were you assigned to go out to figure out what was going on?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I was assigned to the Algiers Motel case. I was assigned from time to time to cover the riot in general. Covering the riot in general is how I saw the National Guard and their convoys shooting out streetlights. I was very surprised because .50 caliber ammunition could go through two to two-and-half, maybe even three houses without stopping. There were a total of more than 40 people who were killed during the riots, many of them innocent. The <em>Free Press</em> I believe did a story reporting on each death long after the riot had subsided.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Going into the Algiers Motel incident, how did you first hear about it?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I don’t recall exactly but it was through the other news media, the <em>News</em> and the <em>Free Press</em>. I’m virtually certain.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Did you go down to the Algiers Motel?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I visited the motel. There was nothing happening except for a lot of policemen who were watching the property at that time. Most of what I did later on that day, within the next 24 hours, on the Algiers Motel was based on interviews. The primary interviewee was the father of one of the victims.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: What other work did you do on that case?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I reported it for the Associated Press. I also cooperated with Lev Newman, who had begun an association with John Hersey in the book that I believe I brought along and that I recommend that you read [<em>The Algiers Motel Incident</em>]. Whatever information Lev didn’t have I furnished him for use by Hersey. I had no interest at the time in writing my own book on it, or doing my own summary of it. So I cooperated with Lev. One of the things I wanted to show you is – I don’t know if you have a copy of this or not. There was a play written ironically with the title <em>Spirit of Detroit, </em>of all things. That was presented several years ago at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History. There was a panel discussion following that play. I was on that panel; I was the sole member of that panel who had actually been at the Algiers Motel and witnessed the events that not too long before had unfolded there. Also later on I covered the trials of three of the policemen. The three policemen who were there: Robert Bailey, David Senak, and Ronald August, who were accused of killing the three youngsters. The Algiers Motel, even though it accounted for fewer numerically victims then the riot itself, three victims out of a total of more than 40, it became a focal point for a lot of the coverage on the riot. It certainly was the focal point for John Hersey’s book, part of <em>The Algiers Motel Incident</em> book. He was best noted for his international bestseller called <em>Hiroshima</em> about the atomic bomb attack on Japan that ended World War II.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Are there any other stories you’d like to share from reporting on the riot that week?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: Just that it was very difficult, for example, for Aubrey Pollard Sr. to gather information on his son. It was difficult as I understood it at the time for the relatives of the other victims — Carl Cooper especially, for example, to obtain information. They apparently were never told why their children had been shot and killed. There was never any evidence to support the theory that gunshots had come from the Algiers Motel and that is why the Detroit Police, the State Police, and the National Guard showed up there in force looking for signs of someone who was firing at law enforcement from there. No gun was ever produced at the trials. The first proceedings were in Detroit in Recorder’s Court and the later proceedings against the three officers were moved to Mason, Michigan, far, far remote from the city and the politically charged atmosphere at the time.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Did you cover the mock trial that was done?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: No, I did not.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: How do you refer to what happened? Do you refer to it as a riot or a rebellion? How do you see the events?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I’m still self-questioning about how it should be described. It certainly was an uprising. It was a riot in the sense that there was looting going on. It seemed to be more a matter of crimes against property than crimes against humanity. One of the phrases that we’re familiar with from recent times is “Black Lives Matter.” People have primarily with the use of video phones have documented attacks against blacks. Practically all of the victims of the 1967 riot were black. But at that time there was no watch word, no phrase such as “Black Lives Matter.” It was sort of taken for granted that the officers would be white and the victims black. There had been some changes inaugurated under Jerry Cavanagh, the mayor, and one of the primary reasons for bringing Ray Girardin as police commissioner was to smooth out the police force and make it less an opponent of the community and more a protector of the community. Unfortunately, due to the riots, disturbances, uprisings, whatever you wish to call them, it never took hold. It’s only in recent years that community policing has become a watch word of the law enforcement agencies.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Did you see the city any differently after ’67?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I saw it as a less inclusive place for white people, less inclusive place for others. I think I fully understood why people left. I tried myself with the property on Maryland long after I was divorced to re-establish roots in Detroit. Ended up having to sell the house at a loss and for lack of a better term, “get out of Dodge.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: What year was that?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I forgot the year.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Are you optimistic for the city moving forward?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I think that there’s more hope generated now in Detroit's reviva than there has been at any time since the riots and the flight from Detroit and the loss of jobs in Detroit. There was a lot of employment, primarily blue-collar people and single family business owners moving from Detroit to, for lack of a better word, “greener pastures.” What they presume to be greener pastures. I saw it with members of my own family. There’s six or seven properties that have been occupied by members of my family, including myself, that yielded to flight to the suburbs.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Do you think the events of ’67 still hang over the city and the metro area?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I think to some extent it does, yes. There has not been an overall overcoming of that feeling. There has been more of a whittling away at some vestiges of racism. I’m reminded of one family in particular – two families actually – that stayed in the East English Village area of Detroit who are pleased that their neighbors are of a different color, maintain their houses, maintain their lawns, and maintain quality looking environments for themselves. I think it’s a struggle for a great many other people.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Is there anything else you’d like to add today?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: I don’t think so.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>WW: Fine. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today. I greatly appreciate it.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>KM: Thank you, William.</p>
<p> </p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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30min 59sec
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Karl Mantyla
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/deUFgk1LhWo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> SHOW MORE
Dublin Core
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Title
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Karl Mantyla, September 9th, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Mantyla discusses growing up in Detroit, the racial situation of 1967 and his feelings about Detroit today. Also, he speaks of his time as a reporter, focusing on the fatal shootings at the Algiers Motel in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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11/01/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral history
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
1968 World Series
Algiers Motel
Associated Press
Detroit Community Members
Detroit Free Press
Detroit News
Detroit Tigers
Governor George Romney
Kercheval Incident
Mayor Jerome Cavanagh
Michigan National Guard
President Lyndon B. Johnson
Recorder's Court - Detroit
White Flight
-
http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/9af478eb73306b8f06268bbcae1bdec5.JPG
70af014eb25fa12c8ee67f0981addfb8
http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/82153b816da5d8d4b8e20050b0800e7c.mp3
bc2f126a98bbf75474bb559d733d3d7f
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Language
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
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Clarence Reed
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Clarence Reed was born in Arkansas in 1934 and moved to Detroit in 1952. After the Kercheval Incident in 1966, he was arrested for inciting and assaulting a police officer but managed to post bail. He worked for Western Union delivering telegrams in the suburbs.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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10/25/2016
Interview Length
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00:26:01
Transcriptionist
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Alyssa Cook Messmer
Transcription Date
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11/22/2016
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello today is October 25, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society Detroit 67 Oral History Project and I am sitting down with Clarence Reed. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>CR: You’re welcome. Glad to be of help.</p>
<p>WW: Can you please start by telling me where and when you were born?</p>
<p>CR: I was born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. My father came here in the Thirties. And I came here in ‘52.</p>
<p>WW: What year were you born?</p>
<p>CR: ‘34.</p>
<p>WW: And you came here in ‘52?</p>
<p>CR: After I graduated from high school in Arkansas.</p>
<p>WW: Coming to Detroit from Arkansas, what was your first impression?</p>
<p>CR: I had been here on a couple of occasions in the summer, you know, summer vacations with my grandmother. I kind of knew the surroundings of the neighborhoods and when I came back to the state, I fell right in. I knew all the kids and everything. I had quite a few cousins that lived here. It was very easy changing towns and changing scenery. It was quite easy for me.</p>
<p>WW: Why did you come up here?</p>
<p>CR: When you’re in the southern cities and you grow up, and you've been in the North in the bigger cities, you're like, “Hey I’d like to live there!” Of course, I enjoyed where I lived but I guess I kind of had outgrown it, you know? I worked in a hotel as a kid after school, and I made nice money as a kid could make. And things just kind of – I’m tired, I want to go to Detroit. So, that’s what I’d done.</p>
<p>WW: What neighborhood did you live in when you came here?</p>
<p>CR: On Hastings, right in the neighborhood where most of the black people lived at the time. I lived on Hastings and Illinois. Black Bottom was down close, that’s where mostly black people lived. You know there and up on up.</p>
<p>WW: What was that neighborhood like?</p>
<p>CR: It was mostly all black people because all the Italian people had moved out by then. A lot of Jewish people who had stores still. It was an all black neighborhood.</p>
<p>WW: Would you like to share any stories from being in that neighborhood from being in your early twenties?</p>
<p>CR: I did get in trouble like young boys do, smoking weed. The police caught me. First time I ever got caught, I went to jail. I thought that was so unfair. I was walking down Hastings, going home, on Illinois, the police rolled through the alley. I had no fear or nothing, I had a little weed in my pocket and I forgot about that. They stopped me and searched me and they come out with this little Seagram can of weed, joints and you know that upset my whole life? I got two-ten for that. In 1956. I got two-ten. I went down to Ionia. I think I was 21. Went to Ionia, I think it was 1954 or '56, something like that. I did two years man, and I came out on time, because I didn’t get in no trouble or nothing but that really changed my life.<br /> <br /> I came back home in ‘58, I met a young lady and we hit it off. We got together and stayed – I didn't marry her right then but we stayed together for the next 30 years almost. I had one little girl, and she had had a daughter, so we had two kids. And I worked at two or three little jobs, but the job I had when the riots started in ‘67-’66, was Western Union. I delivered telegrams. I lived on the west side, and the office where I worked out of was on the east side. So that's why I would be with the guys on the corner, on Kercheval, because I knew all those guys. <br /> <br /> When I came home from the joint, Hastings was tore up, and all the people that had moved out of there moved west. And my people had moved east. So I knew a lot of kids who lived over on the east side, so I would stop over there, after work, I’d deliver the telegrams with a car. I had bought a little car and I went over there in the afternoons and sat and talked and stood around, talking about different things, sports and all that, as young men would be doing. Do you want me to go into the riot now?</p>
<p>WW: No, not yet no. Backing up just a little bit. Going into Sixties, did you notice any growing tension in the city? When you returned to it in the late Fifities, early Sixties was it the same?</p>
<p>CR: No, it wasn't the same. We were not dispersed, we were right in the neighborhood. But after they built the freeway, people dispersed and went all over the place-- some of the places were unfamiliar with us, most of them were. When I came home from the joint, I had never rolled on the freeway. The guys took me down on the Davison freeway, and they were going so fast. I said, “Wait a minute! Don’t do that! Don’t go so fast!” I had never rolled on the freeway, you know? So, it was kind of different. The whole city had changed, people had changed because of the fact they had to move out of their surroundings. It was a change. I didn't discover too much racial tension then when I came home, I didn’t discover that too much. But there was some because this club, ACME, I was older than those guys, Frank and all them. I was quite older – I wasn't quite older. I was about six or seven years older than they were and I had a family and I had to support my family. So therefore, I kind of like wasn't involved in everything with these kids. But I knew a lot of guys that was involved in the riot at that particular time, they're all dead now. Young men all gone, you know. Most of them were gone, you know, there wasn’t nobody left but me and Wilbert, that was involved in the riots. Remember Wilbert?</p>
<p>WW: Yeah, Will McClendon.</p>
<p>CR: We were the only two that went to jail. And that really upset me, because the fact that I got to go back to jail. But it took, four to five years, for them to send me-- you know, it didn't take that much, but I was out on bail, but-- it just didn’t they never get around to that you know?</p>
<p>WW: Back tracking just a little bit, so you were a member of ACME in 1966– </p>
<p>CR: No I wasn’t!</p>
<p>WW: You weren’t a member?</p>
<p>CR: I was just, you know like I said, I was busy working, and trying to take care of my family, but I knew all the kids that was there and most of the kids that was there were neighborhood boys and the white kids come from Grosse Pointe and Royal Oak. Frank and all them came from out there, they were there, kind of like, how do I say, they were – perceived them as – Well, they ran the club. And if there was any money they needed – we didn't have any money you know – and Frank would take care of that and the rent and all those things, you know. So –</p>
<p>WW: How were you caught up in the Kercheval incident of 1966?</p>
<p>CR: Like I said, I was a friend of mostly all the kids around there. I used to live over there in that neighborhood and so I got caught up in it because of the fact I stopped down there when I get through work. And I was on the east side, so I would just stop down there. It was early in the summertime, so I knew everybody’d be standing on the corner in front of the barber shop, and then the little restaurant on Kercheval and Pennsylvania. So, you’d just stop over there, you know. Shoot the bull, you know. So this particular day, we were just standing around, a normal day, you know, hot, talking about the Lions, what they are going to do this year in August, you know, been doing that for the last 50 years or better! [laughs] And they still ain’t done nothing! They’re doing pretty good, now. But anyway, that's how I got caught up.</p>
<p>WW: When did you first know that something wasn't going right? When did the police arrive, can you take us through that?</p>
<p>CR: Well, the police came, we were standing on the corner. The police came, and he pulled up, he was it in a cruiser, he say, “Hey, get off there. Give me the corner!” Hey, we weren’t doing anything, so [we said] “Hey man, get on. What do you want us to do, go over to Grosse Pointe and stand?” I said that, you know. I think I was about the oldest and you know, what are you messing with us for, man? We ain't doing nothing, we’re in our own neighborhood.</p>
<p>And the guy jumped up out the car, and said, “Give me this neighborhood. Give me this street.” We kind of backed up and he immediately called for help. Before anything happened, they called for help, because we didn't move the way they wanted us to move. They called and within a few minutes – VARUBOOM – cars come from either which-a-way. They start pushing us around and this one policeman was grabbing at a friend of mine, and I said, “Hey man!” and put my hands out to touch him and – what did I want to do that for? I went down, they crushed me, man.</p>
<p>There were so many police around me, they couldn’t hurt me, because they were all trying to hit me, and that kept them from really hurting me. Then they finally broke it up, and threw us all in the police cars and took us down on Jefferson and to the police station. The police came in the door, and one policeman said, “Damn, I got cut on my hand.” And he looked at me, and said, “Tell them he did it.”</p>
<p>That white guy, charged me with assault on a police officer. I had never – I didn’t have time! I didn’t have nothing – maybe a little knife, like that big. There was no way I could have gotten that out of my pocket. But this is what they did back then. I mean, they do that now, you know. They gave me the charge of inciting and assaulting a policeman.</p>
<p>They charged me and Will for inciting a riot, and I don't think nobody else was charged. Will did time before I did. Because at the time, I had accumulated a pretty good amount of wealth, a good amount of money. Therefore I had enough money to keep out on bond, you know. And Will had gone to jail. When Will came back out, I hadn’t gone anywhere, and he had done all this time, you know? And at that time I had quite a bit of money. And I had bought new cars, and everything, because I was afraid that if I left my family without any money, what would they do, you know? That's what upset me, I can’t afford to go nowhere now and leave my family without any money – I got two little girls and a wife. I just had to do something.</p>
<p>WW: Did you have to go to prison for this?</p>
<p>CR: Yeah, I went to Jackson. I was in jail for 50-some days in lock up in Jackson. My lawyer came through there, one Saturday, he was going to Chicago, and they had found out that I could get out on bond, and it’d cost me ten thousand dollars. So hey, whatever, I wanted to get out. I got out, he got me out that day, they brought me from Jackson on back home. It went on and on, and Frank and all of us, we got cool, and there had been times in my life when things wasn’t good, but Frank, I had to ask him to pay the rent, and he looked out for my family, you know.</p>
<p>WW: What two months were you in prison, do you remember?</p>
<p>CR: I think – I can’t remember that time. It wasn’t in the winter, because when I came back home, it was still, like, summer. And that was about a full year later, now.</p>
<p>WW: Oh it was that much later? Oh wow.</p>
<p>CR: Yeah.</p>
<p>WW: So you were still in the city in ‘67?</p>
<p>CR: Yeah, uh huh!</p>
<p>WW: Do you remember how you first heard what was going on?</p>
<p>CR: I was out in Inkster. I was with my sister-in-law. We had took the kids, spent the weekend. We heard on the news that the riot had started on Twelfth Street. We lived on Dexter and Davison, so I told my family, “We’ve got to get back down.” The house is there and everything. You don’t know what’s going to happen. So, I got the kids and my wife and we come back home. And that's when the riots started. I mean, it was going, going.</p>
<p>I was working for Western Union still and I worked out in Royal Oak and nobody was working down in the city, kind of scared. I was working out in Royal Oak and Oak Park and all those places, delivering the telegrams. So, the people would look out the window and see a black guy coming and I’d hold out the telegrams, and say, "I’m all right, I’ve got your telegrams, ma’am." And they’d come on. I never had any problems out there, nobody wanted any problems. The problem just had occurred.</p>
<p>WW: Were you surprised or were you expecting any violence to erupt that summer?</p>
<p>CR: No. I wasn’t surprised. See, when it happened with us, we just thought it was a thing that had happened, because we never thought it would occur as a bigger riot. We never even thought about that.</p>
<p>WW: How did you handle the rest of the week? Was your house threatened by fire at all?</p>
<p>CR: No, no, no. It wasn’t, not at all. I didn't have any problems with my home. Like I said, I was still on bond, that went on for about four or five years.</p>
<p>WW: Are there any stories from ‘67, any experiences you had that you’d like to share?</p>
<p>CR: Let me think now.</p>
<p>WW: Did you see anything when you were coming into the city from Inkster?</p>
<p>CR: Oh, you know, smoke rising. It wasn't nothing other than you could just see the smoke and hoping they wouldn't cause harm on our house, or in our neighborhood. When we got home, everything was fine, the next day or two, same as. Well, that's when they had all the tearing and the stealing the breaking in and stuff. They kept on. They did that for a few days. Then they sent in the troops, you know, to kind of quiet things down.</p>
<p>WW: Were you extra worried about making sure you stayed inside, given that you were on bond?</p>
<p>CR: No, I wasn't afraid, I was working.</p>
<p>WW: No, not afraid, but afraid of getting picked up for stuff?</p>
<p>CR: Oh no, no, see when you live like we lived, that's an everyday thing. The first time I went to jail, I came out alright, I had had no problems. I came out and I made a couple of million, afterwards. And I had money, you know, it was easy. You get to be, you do what you do, and you got to live. A person that said they lived, ain't going to do nothing wrong, if you can do something to support your family. That’s why a lot of us got caught up in different things, because of the fact the little jobs wasn't enough to take care of your houses and your home and your wife and your car. It wasn't enough. You did things that you had to do, like drugs and all that.</p>
<p>WW: Do you think the events of '67 still hang over the city?</p>
<p>CR: Mmm. It still does to a degree, because the fact that anybody, any time something happens, you think back on that. This could happen again. Although it hasn’t and thank God it hasn't, but it was always there. If you were there at that time, you think back, “Man, this could happen again.”</p>
<p>WW: How do you interpret what happened in ‘67? Do you see it as a riot? Do you see it as a rebellion?</p>
<p>CR: Well actually, I guess what would you call it? It had to be a riot because of the fact that it wasn’t just people rebelling because of the fact that they were pushed around. It was that they were rebelling because the fact the police come down on them and they aren’t going to take it! Yeah, I don’t see it as being a rebellion. But it was rough. But it was funny though, you live in that and things go on and you just go on about your everyday business. There’s nothing you can do about these things, you got to live, and this is your city too, you know what I’m saying? So there’s nothing you can do but just keep on going. Like I said, I went to work every day, out in the suburbs.</p>
<p>WW: What do you think of the state of the city today?</p>
<p>CR: Well, I think I’m the kind of guy that really hopes and prays that things go well and the city grows. I’m not hung up on the fact that we can’t get along together and stuff like that because I got all kind of friends, as they say, some of my best friends are white. We enjoy one another, been doing that for the last 50 or 60 years. We didn't have no problem with the riot, as far as that was concerned. People like Frank, they were just trying to help our people and some of us didn't have the proper tools to work with. We didn't know how to handle the police. So these kids came down and they showed us how to do it, you know? Frankie’s been a friend of mine for over 50 years. I’ve seen his kids grow up and he’s seen mine, and we’ve been like family. If I need a favor, I can ask him and if he needs one, same thing here. We’ve done that with each other, you know?</p>
<p>And Will, he left here, and went to Las Vegas, no – the Iowa. You wouldn't think, this guy, the kind of hoodlum that he was – Wilbert was a hoodlum! He was one of those kind of guys. You know what he ended up doing? He went on to be a parole officer in Iowa. And retired from it. I just think about the kind of people we were, we weren’t trying to create no problems or nothing, nothing like that. The problems came to us. Actually, we weren’t doing nothing to create no problem. And we weren’t mad with nobody. [The] ACME [office] on the corner of Holcomb and Kercheval, the police would come in and they’d get mad because we all got along so good. The kids come, they tore the office up two or three times. </p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
Length of time involved (seconds, minutes, hours, days, class periods, etc.)
26min 01sec
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
William Winkel
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Clarence Reed
Location
The location of the interview
Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nanhGg2HmdQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Clarence Reed, October 25, 2016
Description
An account of the resource
In this interview, Clarence Reed discusses his memories of first moving to Detroit and his altercations with police in the Fifties and Sixties. He remembers his participation in the Kercheval Incident in 1966 and then talks about his memories of the unrest of 1967.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
11/22/2016
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
Black Bottom
Detroit Community Members
Detroit Police Department
Kercheval Incident
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http://oralhistory.detroithistorical.org/files/original/3829f8e03ede2de2083d7437e6889584.jpg
a1af5fc6830e3cb021c88546b07e18ed
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Title
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Detroit 67: Looking Back to Move Forward
Subject
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Stories gathered to commemorate the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
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Detroit Historical Society
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
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en-us
Date
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10/20/2019
Oral History
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Narrator/Interviewee's Name
The current first and last name of the person speaking or being interviewed.
Frank Joyce
Brief Biography
A short biography of the Interviewee
Frank Joyce was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1941. His family soon thereafter relocated to Berkeley, Michigan and later to Royal Oak, Michigan. Joyce was a prominent New Left activist in Detroit throughout the 1960s, involved in civil rights and anti-war movements, among others. Joyce was also a journalist who worked for both mainstream (WDET) and radical (The Fifth Estate) outlets; he later worked for the UAW. Joyce maintains that the “shadow of ’67” still hangs heavily over the Metro Detroit area.
Interviewer's Name
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William Winkel
Interview Place
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Detroit, MI
Date
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10/17/2016
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1:30:48 (2 parts)
Transcriptionist
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Emma Maniere
Transcription Date
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04/21/2017
Transcription
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<p>WW: Hello, today is October 17, 2016. My name is William Winkel. This interview is for the Detroit Historical Society’s Detroit 67 Oral History Project, and I am sitting down with Mr. Frank Joyce. Thank you so much for sitting down with me today.</p>
<p>FJ: Thanks.</p>
<p>WW: Will you please start by telling me where and when were you born?</p>
<p>FJ: Sure. I was born in Detroit in 1941. My parents lived here until–and this is right away we’re right off into something that’s something a little fuzzy but not that much–sometime when I was quite young. They moved to Berkley, Michigan. We left Detroit. Some people who read this interview may be familiar with Marsha Music’s essay about the kidnapped children of Detroit, and I’ve said ever since I understood that really important concept that she put out there that I was kind of a pioneer kidnapped child of Detroit. My parents were white flighters sometime in the late-1940s. I started elementary school in Berkley, and then at some point we moved from–I think I was still in elementary school–and they moved to Royal Oak. I finished school in Royal Oak and graduated from Royal Oak Dondero High School.</p>
<p>WW: During that time, you’re growing up in the suburbs, did you come to the city or did you tend to stay in the suburbs growing up?</p>
<p>FJ: I’ve recently been writing something where I’ve been thinking about this. We came to Hudson’s to see Santa Claus. As so many suburbanites did. I have some memories of that. Otherwise, we came to baseball and football games. I remember that as a child. But one thing that’s relevant to this project that I just remembered is–and my grandparents lived on Ivanhoe in Detroit until some point in my childhood and so we would come to Detroit to visit them until I was, I don’t remember how many years old. They then moved to Texas.</p>
<p>One thing that I do remember is times that we would be in Detroit as a child and we would be in what was then known as “the ghetto,” and my father making it clear just by the condition of the housing that we saw primarily that we were both better off than those people, and in some way better. I remember that as sort of an early lesson in the culture of white supremacy. Similarly, as a child I remember being on vacations and trips in rural areas in the South where impoverished communities, rural communities, black communities were pointed out to me as some sort of evidence of white people being, again, not only better off but better. To digress on that for a minute, because I’ve written a lot about race over the years and continue to do so, and I’m working on a new book now in fact that is not exclusively about race, but that’s a big part of it. This self-fulfilling prophecy nature of white supremacy, which is that you create a structure that advantages whites. And then you use the physical evidence of that advantage of proof that you deserve it. It’s the born on third base but thought I hit a triple phenomenon that some people have used. Again I, in a way, I maybe have more awareness and more conscious of this now, in the last few years, we’re sitting here in 2016, even though I’ve paid attention to this stuff for a very long time now. I think a lot of things are becoming clearer to all of us about our collective history, but even in my case, our individual history of how things work. So sorry for the long-winded answer, but.</p>
<p>WW: Not to worry. So, having those little moments growing up where you–that was pointed out to you, when did that click in for you growing up? At what point did you become an active agent, say, against white supremacy?</p>
<p>FJ: Here’s the hopefully short version of how that evolved. I was of a generation that I and others have characterized as rebels without causes who found causes. As I mentioned, I graduated from Royal Oak Dondero High School in the class of ’59. As some people know, Tom Hayden graduated from Dondero in the class of ’57. There was clear evidence in Royal Oak at that point of this pushing against authority. Tom, for example, was involved with creating a forerunner of the underground press, a publication called <em>The Daily Smirker</em>, which is a satirical publication that made fun of the school authorities, and, you know, things that teenagers like to make fun of. I was involved in a May Day protest in my senior year in high school. It wasn’t that we had a lot of political consciousness about race or much of anything else, but we <em>were</em> pushing these boundaries of authority, we were questioning authority as became clear later.</p>
<p>What I trace as my first overt political act was in the summer of 1960, I was driving down the infamous Eight Mile Road, and I happened, at the intersection of Eight Mile and Greenfield, and I happened to notice a picket line, a demonstration that I couldn’t really figure out what it was. But I was intrigued by it, so I made a U-turn on Eight Mile Road, and I came back, and I saw that it was a protest at a place called The Crystal Pool, and the protest was over the fact that the pool–remember this is 1960 in the North–that Crystal Pool denied admission to African Americans: it was a white-only public swimming pool in Oak Park, Michigan in 1960. And I said, “Well that’s not right.” So I joined that picket line. Memory is fallible as we know, but I’m pretty sure that John Watson was on that picket line and others who came to be kind of prominent and early activists in Detroit. It happened that there was news coverage, television coverage, of that demonstration which my father saw on TV either that night or the next day, I don’t remember which, and shortly after that I was a homeless teenager, is how I characterize it now.</p>
<p>But part of my rebellion was in my own family, and part of it was in a larger context, but he just considered that like, I had crossed some line at that point and basically I got thrown out of the house. I’ve told this story in writing and a few other times. The good news is that at that point I had a factory job, and I was economically in a position to be self-supporting. I was working at a factory part-time, going to Wayne State part-time. So, I was homeless for two days until I found an apartment, stayed with a friend at first, and had been pretty economically independent for quite a while before that.</p>
<p>Anyway, that was a very explicit political act that somehow, this racial discrimination resonated with me and kind of set me on my life course ever since.</p>
<p>WW: Where did you go from there? You’re at the picket line, and you see the consequences of picketing and protesting.</p>
<p>FJ: Right.</p>
<p>WW: Does that inspire you to keep going?</p>
<p>FJ: It does. I was going to school, as I say, part-time at Wayne State, I was working in a factory, but I had been the president of the student government at Royal Oak Dondero, and I was active in student government at Wayne State as well. In that milieu in 1960 and beyond, there was of course a lot of social ferment and people like Kenny Cockrel and John Watson were students at Wayne State, and so I became involved.</p>
<p>I read an article in a magazine, <em>The Reporter</em> magazine I believe it was, about an organization called the Northern Student Movement. The Northern Student Movement was founded by Peter and Joan Countryman on the campus of Yale University initially as a group of college students supporting the Southern Movement and SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] in particular. We’re not here to talk about the whole history, but the short version is I wrote them a letter, we didn’t have email then, I wrote them a letter, they wrote back, we came to be in communication. I went to a conference on the campus of Yale, and I founded what became the Detroit chapter of the Northern Student Movement. I also became active in the Detroit chapter of the Friends of SNCC–we were sort of an overlapping group. NSM took on its own political evolution, but one of the projects that NSM did that I helped to start in Detroit was a tutorial program which brought college students into mostly elementary schools and other community settings in Detroit, it was a little like a Big Brother Big Sister program. We would do after school programs with young kids in schools to help with reading and so on and so forth.</p>
<p>That very quickly became a radicalizing process because A) I was engaged in Detroit, I was living in Detroit, I was going to school in Detroit, my job was actually in Ferndale, but I became immersed in Detroit the city, which I hadn’t known anything about as a kid growing up mostly in the suburbs, but also became radicalized by the tutorial project at understanding the segregation that existed in the Detroit Public Schools, and the disparity between predominately white schools, which there still were then, and black schools, and so on and so forth. So this all became a part of a radicalizing process that continues to this day, where were we? That set me off and I’ve been a lifelong political activist ever since. One group lead to another: I was active in the anti-war movement, I became active in labor movement, I worked on the staff of the UAW [United Auto Workers] for many years, I became involved in part of my growing up in that time and in that movement was the emergence of new media. I was very early involved in the staff of the <em>Fifth Estate</em> newspaper, I was the news director at WABX, the sort of legendary radio station–not in the first wave of WABX, but later in the late-1970s. I was the news direction at WDET for a while in the 1980s, then went to work in the communications department of the UAW from which I retired 12 years ago now.</p>
<p>WW: Wow. Coming back to the Sixties, so you mentioned you were a founder of the Northern Student Movement in Detroit.</p>
<p>FJ: Right, correct.</p>
<p>WW: Friends of SNCC. Did you do work with ACME in ’66?</p>
<p>FJ: Well, yes. The Northern Student Movement had its own evolution as a chapter in history that is underreported and needs to be written. One of the spin-offs from the Northern Student Movement was that we continued to do these tutorial programs for quite a long time, but we also got engaged not just in Detroit, but this happened in Boston, in Harlem, in Baltimore, in Philadelphia, in community organizing projects around issues of education, housing, police brutality, etc. In Detroit, that took the form of helping to create an organization called the Adult Community Movement for Equality, known as ACME, which was located on the East Side, and basically headquartered, we had an office on Kercheval and Pennsylvania, Mcclellan, that area of Kercheval. ACME became very quickly–while it had a pretty sophisticated political program again around schools, housing, education, etc.–we quickly became very involved in conflict with the police because the police very quickly came to see us as some sort of threatening, radical influence in the community.</p>
<p>Of course this was in the mid-Sixties, we’re sort of in the ’64-65 framework here, but by then, particularly as a result of the civil rights movement in the South, there was a lot of political surveillance going on. We knew people who came to be involved in what became the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and so on. It’s well-documented how much police surveillance there was of what was perceived as radical activity in Detroit. I brought with me today some recently unearthed, to me files that have a lot to say about that police surveillance and that are police documents. I also have gotten some of my own surveillance files from the Detroit Red Squad, from state police, from the FBI, etc., etc. I’d like to say I brag to my kids sometimes that I have the biggest police file of any white guy in Michigan, meaning that of course much more surveillance was devoted to black radicals, but partly because of my association with black radicals, I show up in a lot of these files as well. I was very immersed in all of the emerging movements in Detroit and elsewhere. I was active in the national leadership of NSM as well.</p>
<p>The other thing that happened out of the Northern Student Movement, however, that’s relevant to Detroit history is that before SNCC went through its famous racial divide, at least a year ahead of that, the Northern Student Movement had our own conversation on the question of, “Should white people be working in white communities?” So people like me, who were involved in ACME and in the black community on the East Side of Detroit, basically–and this was not an acrimonious or hostile debate, it was a genuine and serious conversation of “What’s the best strategy here?” I was very persuaded that it made sense for white people to focus activities in the white community.</p>
<p>Somewhere in this time range, ’65-66, we first created a group called Friends of NSM, which was basically the white people who had been active in NSM became Friends of NSM both to raise funds and provide support for the Northern Student Movement, but also to begin to think about, “Well, what would it mean to craft a message and be involved in the white community?” Friends of NSM evolved into an organization called People Against Racism, PAR. PAR became an organization in its own right that flourished for a while: through the late 1960s we had chapters on college campuses, we had chapters in cities literally from coast to coast, from Boston to Palo Alto and places in between. Again, I think it was a more influential organization than the history books tend to give us credit for. That’s partly my own fault for not paying enough attention to that, and particularly for not doing a good enough job of record-keeping. But it turns out there’s more records than I had thought at the Reuther archives and elsewhere, and thanks to taxpayer dollars engaging in political surveillance, there’s a lot of stuff in police files that’s very helpful about the history of NSM and People Against Racism and other organizations. More of that stuff is out there to be looked at by people who are interested than I had realized.</p>
<p>It gave me a really rich opportunity to live in a very dynamic time and have this perspective of coming from the suburbs and into the city, sort of eyes wide-open. And really learn an enormous amount from what is sometimes called the ‘Up North Movement,’ as well as engagement with people who where active in SNCC and Detroit Friends of SNCC, etc.</p>
<p>I only in that time period went South one time, and that was to Selma in what is known as Turn-Around Tuesday. The movie <em>Selma</em> does a halfway decent job I thought, or a more than halfway decent job, of depicting this. Many people know about the Selma to Montgomery March, they know about Bloody Sunday, but after Bloody Sunday there was a call that went out to people to come to Selma and show solidarity and attempt to march once again across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. There was a big meeting in Detroit after Bloody Sunday, and funds were raised, and volunteers were sought to go South. My colleague and comrade and lifelong friend from ACME, Will McClendon, and I, went to Selma as a part of that trip. The march itself, as history shows, was the march where those who showed up went to the Edmund Pettus Bridge again, where we were confronted with a massive display of force from the Alabama State troopers. At that point, Dr. King and other leaders were negotiating with the federal government for some sort of federal protection, which they by that time did not have. So this was the march where Dr. King led people to the bridge, then stopped and prayed and turned around and came back, which was aggravating and disappointing to those of us who were there. But in any case, not knowing what was going to happen next week, we turned to Detroit. I just cite that because virtually all of my political activism has been in the North while supporting the Southern Movement, but as a larger proposition I think also the movement in the North is also kind of underreported as a chapter in the history of the Sixties.</p>
<p>WW: Speaking of Martin Luther King, did you happen to march with him in’63 here?</p>
<p>FJ: I marched in’63. I met Dr. King when he was here I believe for one of his speaking engagements at Central Methodist. We had a situation at that point with–this is a great story, actually, I don’t think I’ve ever told this story before. Within NSM at that point, because we were doing these tutorial programs and we were involved with a lot of young people in the schools, including high school students, and we were increasingly engaged. I remember we picketed the Neisner Store, for example, in downtown Detroit over employment discrimination issues there. There was a lot of activity, to state the obvious. We had a particular case where a really incredibly charismatic, for lack of a better term, young woman was very active in promoting the movement in her high school, and had encountered enormous opposition from her parents, which is something I happen to know a little bit about. And so we knew that Dr. King was coming to town and somehow we reached out to him, and asked would he agree to speak to this young woman’s father, and he said that he would. This entailed me meeting him at a church that he was speaking at, not at Central Methodist, riding in a motorcade with him from that church downtown to Central Methodist, sort of briefing him on what this situation was about, and indeed the father had agreed to come–who wouldn’t come to meet Martin Luther King, at that point? and they did speak, and he never really became fully supportive of his daughter, but he didn’t put up the resistance and opposition that he had before. I had a couple of other personal encounters with Dr. King at other times, but that’s one incredible story. That I remember. What year was that? I don’t know. I’m going to guess … it certainly was after the 1963 march in Detroit, and I also attended the’63 March in Washington in August and helped, as I recall, organize a bus of people who went to that as well. It’s kind of a [inaudible] thing; if it happened I was probably there.</p>
<p>WW: So you mentioned the pushback that this young woman was getting from her father. As you’re protesting, as you’re picketing around Detroit, do you get pushback from other groups?</p>
<p>FJ: Oh yeah. That’s kind of a loaded question.</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>FJ: Yes. In particular, there was an organization called Breakthrough that sort of devoted itself to being the opposition. They would be the Trump Movement of our time, they were part of the backlash and of the opposition to this push for civil rights and racial equality in the North. I can’t recall how many encounters I had with them, Donald Lobsinger and Breakthrough. I do remember being on a television show once, and describing Breakthrough as a parasite organization–this is sort of coming back to me as I’m talking about this–but I said, “You know, if we went out of business, they’d go about of business, too,” because their sort of sole purpose in life was to protest us and to hassle us and to show up at Grosse Pointe South when Dr. King spoke there, for example, and try to disrupt that speech. There was another event in Grosse Pointe South that–this was prior to Dr. King’s famous speech there–I don’t remember some of the details of this, but I remember I was a speaker at the event and Breakthrough disrupted and were escorted out. They did not succeed in destroying that event either, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.</p>
<p>Two other things come to mind when you ask about the opposition in addition to Breakthrough. One was of course the police, and that was particularly focused on Kercheval relative to ACME. At any demonstration we had anywhere in Detroit, there was a massive police presence, and there was massive police surveillance.</p>
<p>The other organization that I would cite as having been incredibly hostile to the movement was <em>The Detroit News</em>, a tradition which continues to this day. I mean Nolan Finley is one of a long history of white editors of <em>The Detroit News</em> who have tried to put the brakes on any and every effort to bring about any sort of progress, but was particularly antagonistic and hostile on issues of race. I know this is on the record, and I’ve said it many times before, so I don’t mind saying it now, I’ve characterized Nolan Finely–who, for those who don’t know, is currently and has been for many years the editor of <em>The Detroit News</em> now–as, “’white supremacists’ chief spokesman Nolan Finley,” because he has routinely–and I’m talking about modern, current times–2016 and over the last several years, however long he’s been there, he has been incredibly hostile to African Americans, and incredibly hostile to change and incredibly denigrating toward African Americans. I remember an editorial he wrote, which I quoted in something I wrote and which has now been deleted from <em>The Detroit News</em> website, in which he basically said, “The reason we need an emergency manager is that black people are not capable of governing themselves.” Again, this is not ancient history, this is within the last few years. There’s a big fog machine that I think confuses a lot of people about how the mechanics of institutional racism and institutional white supremacy works. <em>The Detroit News</em> has been a bastion of opposition for as long as I can remember in my lifetime in this town.</p>
<p>WW: In speaking about the opposition you faced from the Detroit Police Department, could you speak a little bit about the Kercheval Incident in ’66?</p>
<p>FJ: Sure. As I said earlier, ACME–and thank goodness for a woman whose name is Nancy Milio who wrote a book called <em>9210 Kercheval</em>, and Nancy was a social worker who was active in this very same area, and she created a Moms and Tots center which was considered very radical in the practice of social work at that time. A little digression here: Aaron Krasner, known as Ike Krasner, was a faculty member at Wayne State University in the Department of Social Work, and was himself an activist and radical in this time and helped to make Wayne State University a center of radical new thinking about social work. To be honest, I don’t know that Nancy Milio even went there, but I want to give Ike Krasner some credit and some recognition here for what he did. She was a nurse, and as I say, she created this Moms and Tots center that had a very complicated relationship with ACME. We were sort of dealing with the same constituencies in some cases. In any case, she came to publish a book about her experiences on Kercheval, and thank goodness, a lot of her book is about ACME, and she reproduces some of the documents that ACME produced including a manifesto, if you will, that sets out a quite sophisticated program addressing, as I say, education, health, and the whole gamut of issues of institutional racism.</p>
<p>But the thing that came to define ACME’s existence more than anything was this conflict with the police. At one point they came up with some pretense, they raided the ACME office and tore things up and destroyed things and took documents and so on and so forth. On a daily basis, there was this sort of police presence and there was at that time a unit of the police known as the “Big Four,” which was always four, big white men who rode around in big Chryslers and who basically contended for control of the streets, is the way that Will McLendon, who was one of the leaders of ACME, and I would put it. They did this all over the city, and they did it in every city in the United States, and they <em>still</em> do it in every city in the United States. But what made it different in the context of ACME is that it always had this very clear and defined political edge. </p>
<p>Do people call you Bill or William?</p>
<p>WW: Billy.</p>
<p>FJ: Billy? Okay. This was a source of constant conflict and ACME, as I look at this now, we certainly did some things that I’m sure they found deliberately provocative: we picketed police stations. I remember one time we organized a little sort of yippee-like intervention. They were doing an open house at the Fifth Precinct, I get the Fifth and the Seventh mixed up sometimes, but anyway, it was the precinct whose headquarters at that time were on Jefferson and Connor. We kind of invaded the open house and I remember one of our members, Moses Wedlow, who was an extraordinary guy by any measure, sort of took over giving guided tours of the precinct and said, “So this is the little room they put you in when they’re going to beat you,” and we completely disrupted this goodwill community outcome. I cite that just because it’s kind of a fun story on the one hand, but also because it was evidence of this, “We mess with them, they messed with us.” So come to the time of the Kercheval Incident in 1966, for which I was not physically present, by the way, but this led to an encounter that, I guess from the police’s point of view, got out of control in which they pride themselves of over a three-day period having gotten back under control again. Let me stop there and see if you have a follow-up question or where else you want to go with this.</p>
<p>WW: So still speaking about Kercheval, who were some of the other major Detroit activists that were involved, say in the Kercheval Incident?</p>
<p>FJ: Well of course the local activists were Will McClendon and Moses Wedlow, Clarence Reed, a number of other names. Part of the notoriety of the Kercheval Incident is that General Baker and Glanton Dowdell, who at that point were very prominent African American activists in Detroit themselves, were stopped on I think it was the second night of the incident on their way to Kercheval and a number of weapons were found in their vehicle. I think that that’s important because there is this debate, which I’ve weighed in on in many ways and many times about “Was it a riot, was it a rebellion, was it civil unrest?” and my argument in part that it was a rebellion was that in the case of Kercheval at any rate, everybody involved knew that these were overtly political people. You can say, for example, of a blind pig on Twelfth Street, a year later in July of 1967, “Well, that was just sort of the day-to-day tension and struggle between mostly white police and black citizens,” but you couldn’t say that about Kercheval, because ACME was known to the police, had an office, was a political organization, and was already in a kind of medium intensity conflict with the police.</p>
<p>I was pleased to read recently Hubert Locke’s interview for this project and Hubert and I have a long history, and I have great respect for him and for the work he did in the effort that he made in the city. But I noted that in his interview about the Kercheval Incident, and others have made the same point, for all of the pride they took–“and boy did we know how to handle this, and we put on this overwhelming display of force and so we contained this”–he gives a lot of credit to a massive rainstorm that took place on the third night of what was going on and that swept everybody–the cops, and everybody else–off the street. Had that rainstorm not happened, might there have been a different outcome? Well obviously, we’ll never know. We do know, however, that whatever significance is attached to the rainstorm, it was because of Kercheval that from Mayor Cavanagh to the Police Commissioner and everybody on down, there was this confidence that “we know how to handle this.”</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>FJ: Other cities–Newark, other places–this may get out of control, but we have proved and we’ve trained and we’ve learned and we’ve equipped the police to make the kind of presence and so on and so forth that that can contain conflict once it starts. I think hardly anybody disputes that that played a role in them kind of misunderstanding what started on Twelfth Street in July one year later.</p>
<p>WW: Did your work change after the Kercheval Incident? Was there a sense of worry going forward that the police were going to be more openly antagonistic toward you?</p>
<p>FJ: That’s a great question. I think that we thought they probably couldn’t be anymore antagonistic than they were already. A couple of other things happened at the same time. For one thing, of course, Will McClendon and Clarence Reed were charged for inciting a riot and we became involved in their legal defense in the immediate aftermath of Kercheval, and they were I think unjustly convicted, they both did, in Will’s case, quite a bit of time, in Clarence’s, not so much. It would be fairer to say that we were in a certain way put on defense from that point forward in a way that we had not been previously. That did have a disruptive effect on ACME and its ability to do what it was there to do.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>At the same time, personally, I was going through this transition that I mentioned before of shifting into, “What do we need to be doing in the white community, and what kinds of programs and organizing and educational materials and so on,” because that was the period of the evolution first to Friends of NSM and then to People Against Racism, so my own attention was shifting more towards People Against Racism.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>I also was becoming more involved in the anti-war movement at that point. And I remember very well the conversation within People Against Racism about the war, because it was a formative experience for us. We developed position papers and we had a long conversation at the end of which we said, “This is a racist war. If we are People Against Racism, we must be against this war.” The grounds for believing that the war in Vietnam was a racist war was twofold: First, we felt that this kind of death and destruction and brutality was a continuation of the racial practices that we were coming to understand that went with slavery, that went with genocide against the indigenous people of the United States, and that this war was not going on against white Communist countries. The allegation, in the case of Vietnam, or the cover story was, “Well, we’re stopping Communism.” “Well, why don’t you stop Communism in Poland? Why don’t you drop napalm on the Polish people if you think that that’s the way, if that’s how you have to achieve regime change?”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So we thought the war was racist on those grounds, and we thought we thought the war was racist because we understood that black and brown people were experiencing a way disproportionate impact of casualties, of being killed and injured in the war. All of these threads were converging in 1967, in that year from ’66-67, both in my own personal life, and in how the movement in Detroit and around the world was evolving.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Somewhere in there, I don’t know that I could put even an approximate date on it, but somewhere in there, ACME kind of fell apart. Keep in mind that as a result of COINTELPRO, and as a result of police surveillance and intervention, none of the organizations of the Sixties really survived, not SNCC, not SDS, not the anti-war coalitions sort of lasted more into the early-Seventies. But I have long maintained that too little attention is paid to, I have to say it, the success of political repression, the success of intervention and arrests and assassination, obviously in the case most notably of Malcolm X and of Martin Luther King. As too few people know, scores of civil rights activists, particularly in the South but not exclusively in the South, were killed.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>By vigilante groups, by the police, etc., etc. You know it’s funny. When we want to go make an intervention in some foreign country we often cite the repressive machinery of the state as stifling dissent and free speech and democracy and so on and so forth; well, it works, and the evidence that it works is, you don’t have to go to some country in Latin America or Africa or Asia to prove that, you can go to the United States. That did begin to have an effect. I’ve written about this: we had our own internal problems, I think we weren’t prepared to deal with the level of repression, we didn’t understand U.S. history, we didn’t really understand what we were up against, and there were other flaws that I can look back on now in terms of what our philosophy and our goals and objectives were, but we for sure were not ready for the level of political repression that we encountered. So, the short answer summary of that is that ACME kind of fell apart.</p>
<p>WW: Before we get into ’67, so during the year before ’67, what was the state of, say, left-wing activism? In Detroit, was it a cohesive group, or was it multiple groups working toward the same goal but independently? Because you mentioned you’ve worked with John Watson, you’ve worked with General Baker, you’ve worked with Will McClendon. Was it a unified group?</p>
<p>FJ: I would say is that it was sort of all of the above. What I mean by that–I’m not trying to be cute–I think Detroit is a special place. I think the history of the movement in Detroit, if for no other reason than the importance of the League of the Revolutionary Black Workers coming from Detroit, and because of the history of Detroit preceding the 1960s because of the labor history of Detroit and the deep roots of political struggle and particularly the Black community in Detroit that goes way, way, way back. I think the Detroit movement had a vitality and an energy that was important and extensive. But I think we also had all of the political contradictions that were to be found both in the national movements and so on.</p>
<p>The most important of those contradictions, and again I’ve written quite a bit about this, is that I think the movements of the Sixties themselves never overcame the racial divide. I think you have the “white movement” on the one hand, which was SDS and the women’s movement and a big part of the anti-war movement, and then I think you had the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement and the League of Revolutionary–you know, the name was the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. It’s not that those things didn’t overlap and intersect: white people went to the South, obviously, and I as a white activist was very engaged with the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. I mentioned earlier later in that process when Jim Forman left SNCC and came to Detroit because this is where the League was, and he and I taught a class together. It’s certainly true that there was, however you slice it, there was some contact between white activists and black activists.</p>
<p>That being said, there were organizations that were overwhelmingly white, and other organizations that were overwhelmingly black. Even more as my own politics and understanding has evolved to this day, I understand that we have a–I sometimes call it ‘eugenic capitalism,’ I sometimes call it ‘race-based capitalism,’ I sometimes borrow Jim Lawson’s phrase ‘plantation capitalism’–we have a particular animal that we are dealing with here, not just in Detroit, and not just in the United States, but the history of colonialism on a global basis that requires and compels us to understand the power and the dynamic of race. I think we tried hard in the 1960s to do that, but I don’t think we got there. I think we didn’t understand it from an analytical point of view as well as we can now, and we certainly didn’t understand it from an organizational point of view. I can go on and on that, and I have in writing .</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>FJ: And I will some more, but we don’t have all year here.</p>
<p>WW: So going into ’67 and then going into the summer of ’67–were you and other activists anticipating anything in Detroit? Watts has happened, Newark is going on. Are you anticipating that there will be an uprising in Detroit?</p>
<p>FJ: That’s a great question, and I don’t know that anybody has asked it exactly that way before. I think that we certainly thought it was entirely possible, how could we not? Particularly those of us who had been very directly involved in the Kercheval situation, and who knew how volatile things were and who knew–and I’m sure there’s things in writing that maybe you’ve already looked at or whatever–but whether in <em>The South End</em>, or things that the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">Cleage’s</span> (??) were publishing at that point, no one was under the illusion that this cover story of ‘Detroit is different because things are better here and because we’re the poster child for liberal policies and model cities and so on and so forth,’ we knew that was all nonsense. We knew that one-millimeter below the surface was conflict with the police, was racial segregation, was institutional racism, so the possibility that at any given moment something could break out was in our minds. But I don’t know that anybody sort of specifically predicted that what was going to happen would happen. None of us were surprised, that’s for sure.</p>
<p>WW: How did you first hear about the incidents going on at Twelfth and Clairmount?</p>
<p>FJ: What a story! So, I was not in Detroit at that point, I was in London, England, attending something called the Dialectics of Liberation Conference with Stokely Carmichael. You can look this up: there’s websites that talk about the Dialectics of Liberation Conference, and there’s some accounts from people who were there of sort of me, and Stokely, and some of things that went on in that regard. I honestly don’t remember the sequence here, but somehow, news accounts began to make their way into the international media of the time. The Dialectics of Liberation Conference, by the way, was this radical gathering of activists from all over the world, including from the United States, that itself had sort of an interesting take on, “Where are we at in this point of history?” and so on and so forth. At some point, with all due respect–and I really mean this, to my friend Hubert Locke–as I recall it, he didn’t tell this in his story, but at some point Hubert Locke reached me in London and said, because of Kercheval and other reasons, “Do you know what’s going on here, and do you have ideas about anything we can do about it?” was sort of the way I remember it. I said, “Well, I’m vaguely of what’s going on,” and this would’ve happened whether I’d gotten that phone call or not, but I said, “I’m coming back to Detroit.” I remember–this was easier to do then than it is now–but I remember changing my flight, and the earliest flight I could get, it still took me any number of hours before I could. But I came back to Detroit early.</p>
<p>By the time I got here, of course things had escalated to an incredible degree. But I remember that People Against Racism, which was my primary organization at that point, started to organize and I remember we had a meeting at a church in Royal Oak, and we established some sort of outpost as I recall at Grace Episcopal Church, where Father David Gracie was located who had been a longtime supporter of the movement to bring people together to talk about what was going on to try to figure out whether there were supplies that we could raise, that people need that were being dislocated and so on and so forth. I was up to my eyeballs in it. At that point, the Detroit Police no longer had any reason in talking to me, and I didn’t have any interest in talking to them either, but it’s just a funny little footnote of history, getting that call from Hubert.</p>
<p>A parallel story is that I was still at that time the news editor of <em>The Fifth Estate</em> newspaper. So one of the other things that happened as things were still smoldering, is that I was still the news editor of <em>The Fifth Estate</em> at that point, and as a result of people that I knew on the East Side, I was told of a story which turned out to be basically a story of the National Guard assassination of a young man who was named, I remember to this day, John Leroy. I got to work on a story about the brutality of the police and, in particular, the National Guard during the rebellion. <em>The Fifth Estate</em> published a story, which was referenced actually in <em>The Fifth Estate</em> exhibit that was done here at the Detroit Historical Museum, a front-page story called “Who Killed John Leroy?” Peter Werbe and others at <em>The Fifth Estate</em> and I are still proud of the fact that we think before the <em>Free Press</em> got into investigating what happened at the Algiers Motel, we were really the first publication to raise and document a story about the incredible brutality and repression.</p>
<p>Perhaps others have said this as well, I think its widely understood in some circles at least that our interpretation even at that time of what we knew in the moment was the main reason that the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne came to Detroit was to control the National Guard, it wasn’t necessarily to control the population, because the National Guard was out of control and basically the police were out of control at that point. Who knows how many more people would’ve been killed had it not been for the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne, which had brought–I’m not saying any of this would have called to bring the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne into Detroit. By the way, a side note, the law that had to be used to allow the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne to participate, to be deployed domestically, was specifically a law about insurrection; I cite that in terms of this ongoing debate about rebellion or riot because the law sort of anticipated exactly–well, maybe not exactly–but a situation like this as a time when federal troops could be deployed domestically. In any case, not only were they a far more disciplined fighting force obviously, but there were a lot of black people in the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne and there were not a lot of black people in the National Guard at that point, that was an overwhelmingly white organization. As I say, but for that fact, probably even more people would’ve been killed than were killed–of course, all of whom were killed by the police.</p>
<p>Anyway, the story of “Who Killed John Leroy” is something I’m proud of and proud of because it was at least shining a tiny little light on, ‘let’s look at what was the conduct of the police and the National Guard and the federal troops in this.’ And it’s an old story in US history of course, that the military is created in part out of fear and anticipation of slave revolts going all the way back to slavery, and of course of having to clear territory and otherwise deal with Indigenous Americans, so there is this continuous line throughout our history that is a part of my mission to this day continues to be to help white people understand that. I don’t know where that leaves us, but.</p>
<p>WW: So now the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne has come, and the rebellion is put down, essentially.</p>
<p>FJ: Correct.</p>
<p>WW: I have a couple of effect questions. So what effect did the rebellion have on your activism?</p>
<p>FJ: Well it didn’t diminish it in any way, that’s for sure. I think, again, my primary sort of base at that point in addition to <em>The Fifth Estate</em> was People Against Racism, and we became even more active, and it became even more apparent to us that institutional racism was a very powerful and brutal force in American life. So we continued to do the work of People Against Racism, and at that point as I say, we have active chapters in a number of cities and on many, many college campuses. I think it’s fair to say that I had not thought about it this way until now, but I think it’s fair to say that in the same sense in which 1966 was maybe the beginning of the end for ACME, maybe 1967 was the beginning of the end for People Against Racism because, in part, I think we got, there’s this drip-drip-drip isn’t the right expression, but there was this relentless political repression and surveillance and so on. We were a white group so weren’t experiencing it the way Black Panthers or SNCC or anybody like that was, but we still knew that even for the kind of work we were doing, there was a lot of opposition.</p>
<p>Of course, we previously referred to Donald Lobsinger and to Breakthrough, but these kinds of organizations are a permanent feature of American political life. They ebb and they flow, we happen to be in a time of the presidential campaign of Donald Trump which obviously is capturing a lot of this, “I want my America back again,” and we know what people mean. There’s a left-wing version of, “I want my America back again,” too, by the way, but the right-wing version of, “I want my America back again,” is, “We want white people clearly in charge,” that’s what that’s all about.</p>
<p>I cite that just because obviously post-’67 in Detroit, the anti-war movement is still gathering steam at that point, but personally I think it’s fair to say that even within People Against Racism, we began to pay more attention to the war as a focal point of our activities, for better or for worse, not even entirely sure why that happened, but part of why it happened was that that was still a growing and very dynamic component of the movement.</p>
<p>In any case, were there people in that period who dropped out of politics? Well, nobody that I knew. I think maybe people did get burned out. And people sort of did take a break from politics at various points along the way, but I don’t know, I was as busy as ever.</p>
<p>WW: You touched on a couple points in our interview so far. The term ‘rebellion’ and why you use that terminology. Could you go in-depth with it for a couple moments?</p>
<p>FJ: Sure. I’ve already said that I think, don’t take my word for it, take the government’s word for the fact that it was a law about insurrection that was used to create the legal justification to send the 82<sup>nd</sup> Airborne to Detroit. I’ve also said that in the context of the Kercheval Incident, that was a conflict between an overtly political organization and the police and it had a long history before August of 1966 and a history after that. Also I’ve talked about the fact that–and I think for white people in particular this is important to understand–language does matter. The investment that a lot of white people have in calling this a riot is precisely because they don’t want to concede that black people had anything to rebel about, and because the characterization of this as criminal activity as opposed to political activity fits the whole ideology of white supremacy in the first place. Because whites perceive blacks as an underclass, a criminal class, etc., and going all the way back to slavery, the demonization of black people in order to create a moral justification for slavery and for the oppression and segregation and exploitation of black people is at the core of the identity of the United States of America. That’s hard for people to accept, it’s hard for people to hear, it’s hard for people to understand, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. So this debate–‘riot’ versus ‘rebellion’–this argument over a word does not take place in a vacuum, it takes place in the context of this.</p>
<p>Interestingly enough, fast-forwarding to the present for a minute, so now we have Nate Parker’s film <em>Birth of a Nation</em>, and there’s a growing understanding and a better understanding of African American history and of the fact that the institution of slavery has always faced resistance from black people, but that resistance has also always been distorted and mischaracterized and demonized in and of itself. Again, there is this continuing from whether you’re talking about Nat Turner or Denmark Vesey or some of the episodes leading up to and during the Civil War of mass black desertions, of blacks joining the Union Army. I could go on and on about some of this history, but the importance of it is to understand that this is a linear process. We’ve been having this argument about ‘rebellion’ versus ‘riot’ since the 1600s, and it’s as an important a conversation to have today as it was then.</p>
<p>I’m actually encouraged that we’re in a new wave of scholarship, and in a new kind of conversation about race. You know, I’ve been doing this for a long time, so I find some of the things for example, some of the programs that the African American History Museum is doing here. There hasn’t always been an African American History Museum. It is the cumulative effect of this movement and of the civil rights movement for example creating spaces in colleges and universities for scholars to do African American studies–white and black scholars I might add–to produce new work and better understandings of our own history whether you’re talking about 10 years ago or 100 years ago or 400 years ago, we are better positioned to, I hate the term ‘conversation about race,’ but partly because we’ve never not had a conversation –we talk about race all the time, and we have from the beginnings of the slave trade been talking about race, and white people talk about race all the time, and white people talk about their fear of rebellion and their fear of uprisings, and their fear of revenge and of justice. I can speak as a white person of a certain age, I’ve heard variations of the, “Well what if they started treating us the way we’ve treated them?” It’s not like white people don’t know what’s happened here, they know deep in their heart and their head what has happened, and they have a lot of fear, and that is also a big component of this ‘we have to call it a riot.’</p>
<p>WW: Wow. Thank you so much.</p>
<p>FJ: I have a follow-up to that.</p>
<p class="Normal1">End of Track 1 [1:08:18]</p>
<p class="Normal1"> </p>
<p>WW: Part two: The Frank Joyce interview.</p>
<p>FJ: Well, we were on a little tangent there, but let me stay on the tangent for a minute.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>FJ: Because it fits with another point that I want to make. I have long singled out <em>The Detroit News </em>for its prominent and particular role as an advocate for and defender of white supremacy and racial privilege and racial segregation and the attitude that white people are a better-than black people and more deserving than black people and so on and so forth. I think one cannot understand either how did we get to the point of 1966 and ’67, and I think I haven’t said this yet, but I do consider ’66 starting at Kercheval and ’67 to be one continuous event, just happened to last about 340 days, and continues in its own way to this day, because it’s not like this conflict is over with or is resolved.</p>
<p>In any case, I think <em>The Detroit News</em> had a particular role to play in creating the conditions and attitudes in Detroit that preceded ’66-67, but I think they continue to play that role and in particular–and actually this is a good segue into the other point that I want to make. One of the other arguments that I make for ‘how do we know it was a rebellion, not a riot,’ is by reverse engineering what happened after the rebellion. I compare what happened toDetroit, and I use that term on purpose, after 1967 to what happened to Haiti after the Haitian uprising in 1791, if that’s exactly the right year, I think it is. What I mean by that is that Detroit was punished, and that the fears of white people which always just below the surface are of rebellion, are of uprising, are of revenge and fear motivates white attitudes in a way almost as much–maybe as much–in 2016 as in 1616, 1716, and all the years in between. And it is this notion that deep down inside we know that what we’re doing is wrong, and that whether it’s Christianity or whatever, that somehow, somewhere, there’s gong to be a price to paid for this on one hand, and on the other hand, there’s this notion that we must keep a lid on this. We must punish those who rebel. All of the known slave rebellions, for example, Denmark Vesey, Nate Parker, and so on and so forth, they were all hunted down and hung. The communities–whether it was the Church or the neighborhoods or the communities from which they sprang–were punished too. We have this notion of collective punishment, which is that, “Okay, we’re not saying everybody did it–not everybody went into a store on Twelfth Street, and took a TV set, or whatever–but in order to see to it that this doesn’t happen again, we are going to reassert our power and our control.” Militarily. So for example, and I wrote a piece about this shortly after the rebellion, we hear today a lot about police departments being weaponized with surplus weaponry from the Pentagon and from war. Well in Detroit, shortly after the rebellion, at taxpayer expense, not because the Pentagon was giving anything away for free, a bond issue was passed which was used in part to buy heavy weaponry for the Detroit Police Department: military personnel carriers, assault weapons, all kinds of other stuff, and I wrote about that at the time.</p>
<p>That in a way was only the half of it because as hostile as suburbia and as out-state Michigan might have been to Detroit as it was becoming a predominately black city, all of that hostility greatly intensified after 1967. You see that play out certainly in the state legislature again and again and again, very dramatically on the question of regional transit, for example. We’re facing a ballot proposal about creating a Regional Transit Authority, and it will be, I believe, number 27 in a series of regional transit proposals everyone of which up to now has been defeated. I’m optimistic about this, I think it’s evidence of the fact that some things maybe have changed here. But the 26 defeats are a dramatic example of this attitude of, ‘We do not want to do anything that facilitates interaction and transportation between black Detroit and the suburbs.’</p>
<p>As you may know, but others may not, I remember not that many years ago Wal-Mart wanted to build a store in Livonia. People militantly opposed Wal-Mart’s building a store in Livonia not because of the reasons that Wal-Mart meets a lot of antagonism: it’s bad for small business and so on and so forth, people explicitly stood up and said, “If there’s a Wal-Mart in Livonia, black people will work there, and black people will come here to shop, and we don’t want that.” This notion of rigid residential and economic segregation between the suburbs of Detroit–I mean white flight is of course what made Detroit predominately a majority black city in the first place. Once white flight had taken place, the notion that was crystallized so clearly and repeated only recently by L. Brooks Patterson of what we should do with Detroit is build a wall around it and throw in the blankets and corn, characterizes for me not the only response but the predominant response to 1967 of hostility, of punishment, of control, of antagonism.</p>
<p>Glibly people say, even Nolan Finley will said this, “We live in a racially polarized community.” Well we sure as hell do, but it takes certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of attitudes and certain kinds of legislations and certain kinds of practices on the part of white people to create that polarization and to keep it in place. Those forces are still very powerful. I think they’re not as powerful in 2016 as they were probably in 1969, but they are baked into the institutional and power arrangements of our society in that sense. Thomas Sugrue of course is one of many who’ve written about this, but in that sense they continue to be baked into the intuitional arrangements and into how we talk about race in Detroit to this day.</p>
<p>WW: Wow. Thank you.</p>
<p>FJ: Thank you.</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>FJ: Wrap it all up and tie a bow around it.</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.] A few more questions first.</p>
<p>FJ: Sure, okay.</p>
<p>WW: So I asked you earlier how the rebellion affected your work. How did the rebellion affect activism in Detroit in general? Did you personally see an uptick in say organization or activism?</p>
<p>FJ: Well, to refer back to something I said before, it’s hard to sort of separate out, “Okay, what was the impact of the rebellion?” versus, “What were these other macro-forces that were in play?” By the end of the 1960s, for example, SNCC and SDS and all of these organizations with the something of the exception, as I said, for the anti-war movement, were beginning to crash and burn, for a variety of reasons.</p>
<p>WW: Okay.</p>
<p>FJ: Certainly, rebellions were a national phenomenon from Detroit to Newark to Watts to etc., so that plays into the national mix here. Certainly, the intensification of the war in Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia at the same the intensification of the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, in Latin America as well were part of kind of the big picture forces that were in play here. The other thing I think it’s fair to say is that I don’t care whether you’re talking about the labor movement in the 1930s, for example, or even the Civil War for that matter, things run in kind of waves and phases and they run out of gas and then things are more dormant for a period of time until, for whatever reasons, these things happen. The period we’re in now, with Black Lives Matter, for example, and other organizations that are reframing and reenergizing these political conversations. I include the Bernie Sanders Campaign in that, for example. We’re in a maybe a pre-movement or early-movement time again, but how much weight to give to political repression, how much weight to give to other things, things did kind of run out of gas. Even the anti-war movement, which I stayed active in until the very end–in which I’ve, a year or so ago, co-edited, published a book about, even the anti-war movement–basically ran out of gas in 1973 at the time the Paris Peace Accords sort of officially ended US participation in the war. Now we know the war didn’t really end until 1975, but certainly by 1973, the anti-war movement was out of gas as well, except for some die-hard people like me.</p>
<p>And there were die-hard people in all of these movements who continued on. One of the things when I talk to young people today, which I of course very much enjoy doing, is nobody told me when I was your age that you should start thinking about this as the work of a lifetime. But it is the work of a lifetime. The overwhelming majority of people who were active in the Sixties are still active in some way or other, obviously not as intensely as they were, but there’s a real core of people like me who, we zigged, we zagged, we had kids, we had families, we did some other things, but we continued to be politically active. Anyway, to try to sum that up in a slightly more coherent fashion, I just can’t pinpoint where in the winding down of that movement the rebellion fits.</p>
<p>WW: Okay. To you, is there a difference between the organizations that blossomed before the rebellion and after; say SNCC fell before the rebellion, and then is there a difference between say SNCC and Ad-hoc Action Group or DRUM or League of Revolutionary Black Workers, was there a strikingly different tone to their work compared to the work in the early Sixties?</p>
<p>FJ: You know I really don’t think so. I’d love to have a conversation with somebody who disagrees, but I see that more as evolutionary, not some big break and then we started over.</p>
<p>WW: Uh-hm.</p>
<p>FJ: I think that we all were learning things at the time. In retrospect, we clearly didn’t learn enough. As I said before, we really were naïve about a lot of things. We were naïve in part because, using this term in the broadest possible way, we were a <em>New</em> Left. It’s not that we didn’t have some connections to the Communist Party and to some of the key organizations of previous struggles and previous movements, but we were in part rebelling against them too. What that meant, and there’s an upside to this as well as a downside, but it meant that we were figuring it out on our own. Now, amongst organizations that I think doesn’t get the credited desserts in American history is the Communist Party. I was pleased to see R.D.G Kelly has recently written a book in which he talks about this. Particularly on the issue of trying to form organizations and movements that could bring blacks and whites together in the workplace, in communities, and so on and so forth, the CP was trying to do that, and had no small success at doing that for a very long time. Of course, they paid a price as well, and of course, there’s a bigger story to tell there.</p>
<p>Let me just think about it personally. There’s a lot of continuity in the evolution of my own political thinking over 50 years, and it’s a mosaic and every piece of it fits somewhere. I think, for example, I give a lot of credit to initially Jimmy and more so Grace Boggs, but I think as their political thinking evolved, and as they brought us to a point of understanding that we need to take a fresh look at how this society is organized and one that was, to use Arundhati Roy’s phrase, what a better world might look like. I think again Detroit in many ways leads the way in this of not being stuck, of not being doctrinaire, of being able to step back from our own movement and look at, “What did we do right, what did we do wrong, and more immortally, what do we need to be doing now?” But there’s many threads, but I do see it as a whole piece of cloth, if you will.</p>
<p>In some ways, just a specific point–picking up, reacting to the Ad-Hoc Committee, in some ways some of the work that we did attracted more support from whites after the rebellion than it had before. In its own way, that goes to my argument about rebellion because it wasn’t just that the response of the white establishment or whites in general was 100 percent repressive. Again, go all the way back to slavery, and go all the way back to the Indian Removal Act, or pick any symbol you want of the genocide against indigenous people in the United States and elsewhere, there are always some whites who are saying, ‘More carrots, less sticks’. To further mangle that metaphor, I think that we began to see some resources that were available, some from foundations and from wealthy individuals and from other organizations who kind of got it and said, ‘The root of this problem is segregation, it is economic exploitation of African Americans, and we need to address that part of the problem too.’ So, that didn’t prevail, the bad guys won out and the punishment and control people were more powerful than that, but there was a liberal response for sure.</p>
<p>WW: Speaking about Detroit groups in particular, you mentioned how groups were burning out and sputtering out.</p>
<p>FJ: Uh-huh.</p>
<p>WW: What was the lifespan of Detroit’s hard-core political groups?</p>
<p>FJ: Well I don’t know if Shelia talked about this in your conversations with her, but of course one of the things that was important to Sheila and me and a lot of other people was what is known–we’re getting really into the weeds here of history–was what is known as the split in the Motor City Labor League, because one of the things that emerged in that period was, out of DRUM and what became the League of Black Revolutionary Workers and so on, a multiracial organization that was trying to build on what had we learned and what had we organized up to that point. It created very successful programs such as the Control, Conflict, and Change Book Club for example, which I’ve been trying to recreate ever since–one day I’ll succeed. That goes to the point earlier of how after the rebellion, there was even more energy, and more organizing, and more activity going on. But, how much of this might’ve been in part exploited by COINTELPRO or the police or whatever, we began to encounter serious political differences about ideology, about strategy, about Marxism, about many, many of these questions.</p>
<p>There was an organization called the Motor City Labor League, it divided in a very bitter conflict, and I think did contribute to the demise of at least a significant part of the Detroit left. It would be wrong not to mention that, and I’m glad you brought it up, because that certainly played a big role.</p>
<p>WW: Another very loaded question: do you think that the quote-unquote “shadow of ’67” still hangs over the Metro area?</p>
<p>FJ: Oh, absolutely, very much so. When I wrote my piece in <em>The</em> <em>Free Press</em> earlier this year about ‘riot’ versus ‘rebellion,’ I had that very much in mind, and I started that piece with saying something like, ‘It’s a part of the summer ritual,’ because not a summer has gone by since that that anniversary isn’t marked, it’s like 9/11 or Independence Day or something. This metropolitan area pays attention to 1967 on every year ending in the number seven, and I’m sort of fantasizing out loud here, but maybe we’ll know we’ve made some real progress when a year goes by and nobody does that. It is a part of the summer ritual here, and I say that to say that the ‘riot’ versus ‘rebellion’ debate, it’s like a smoldering ember and the flames shoot up all over again, so in that narrow way, it continues to cast a shadow. In a broader way, in a far broader way, as a result of what has been done to Detroit, as I was saying earlier, the destruction of the Detroit Public Schools, for example, emergency management, bankruptcy, the distortions of the tax code that are punitive towards Detroit, the question I mentioned earlier, the isolation of Detroit by the refusal to create a regional public transportation system, I could go on and on and on, but in those ways, very directly, we are still in the shadow of 1967 for sure.</p>
<p>WW: Well thank you so much for sitting down with me. Is there anything else you’d like to add?</p>
<p>FJ: God, I don’t think so.</p>
<p>WW: [Laughter.]</p>
<p>FJ: Of course, on the way home, I’ll think of five things.</p>
<p>WW: I’d be happy to sit down with you again.</p>
<p>FJ: Okay.</p>
<p>WW: Thank you so much.</p>
Original Format
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Audio
Duration
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1hr 30min
Interviewer
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William Winkel
Interviewee
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Frank Joyce
Location
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Detroit, MI
Video
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<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZTCjMVBkwU4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dublin Core
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Title
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Frank Joyce, October 17th, 2016
Description
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Joyce was a committed New Left Activist in Detroit in the 1960s. Here, he discusses the fragmentation–exacerbated by governmental and police surveillance–of many Detroit organizations. He was a member of the Northern Student Movement, People Against Racism, the anti-war movement, the UAW, The Fifth Estate, and ACME. Joyce recounts the 1966 Kercheval Incident, which he considers starting point of 1967 disturbance. He weighs in on the “riot” versus “rebellion” debate, and forcefully sides with the latter. He also discusses the role of the rebellion not only on Detroit’s radical organizing, but on the Detroit Metropolitan area generally. Throughout the interview, Joyce comments on the ways in which “white supremacy culture” has factored into Detroit’s (and America’s) history.
Publisher
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Detroit Historical Society
Date
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04/21/2017
Rights
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Detroit Historical Society, Detroit, MI
Format
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Audio/WAV
Language
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en-US
Type
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Oral History
1967 riot—Detroit—Michigan
82nd Airborne Division-US Army
Activism
Algiers Motel
Breakthrough
Community Activists
Detroit News
Kercheval Incident
Martin Luther King Jr.
Michigan National Guard
Racism