Ready For a Brand New Beat

by Mark Kurlansky

  None of this is to say that Detroit was a haven from racism and poverty. Many jobs and much housing were for whites only. High wages in the Detroit economy went only slightly farther than the low wages in the economy of the rural South.

  Still, for many rural southern blacks this northern city was the Promised Land, just for the possibilities, the chances that were offered. In the South, blues songs were written about going north to work for Ford.

  I’m goin’ to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place

  Stop these eatless days from starin’ me in the face.

  Later in Detroit, blues songs were written about the hardship of working on the assembly line. But as with the Jews of eastern Europe, there was no question of going home if things did not go well. Conditions were even worse at home, and as Amiri Baraka pointed out, the South would always be “the scene of the crime.”

  So rural was the immigrant population of Detroit that even today, with the exception of downtown, Detroit is largely a city of country houses, many of them in the design of farmhouses. Detroit-born Ivy Jo Hunter, one of the coauthors of “Dancing in the Street,” said of his hometown, “This is the largest country town in the world.” Though housing projects were built later, many of the new people from the South lived like Martha Reeves’s family, in wooden shingled houses with porches and yards surrounded by chain-link fencing and a gate. Though humble, small two-story homes, usually too small for the size of the family, they were often a step up from the shacks and log cabins the families came from.

  And so Detroit became a city of blacks who would strive to succeed in endeavors typical of immigrants, primarily the assembly line. Those who dreamed larger, like other immigrants before them—the Irish, the Italians, the Jews—saw their two greatest possibilities for success in sports and entertainment. Gordy and singer-songwriter Smokey Robinson were first-generation Detroiters. Martha Reeves, the original three Supremes, and Wilson Pickett were all born in the South and, like boxers Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, were childhood immigrants to Detroit. Detroit was a city of immigrants aspiring to be athletes and entertainers. Detroit-born Berry Gordy, the classic first-generation son of immigrants, tried both.

  • • •

  As with all great American immigrant stories, the Gordys worked hard and with determination and advanced in each generation. For the Gordys this was a process that had begun long before they immigrated. Berry Gordy Jr.’s great-grandmother, Esther Johnson, a major influence on the early life of his father, was a slave, impregnated by her owner, a white man named Jim Gordy. In the 1960s, when such prominent black people as the boxer Cassius Clay and the writer LeRoi Jones changed their names, stating that they would not carry slave names, it was undoubtedly true. The Gordy family name was an example of what had happened. But the Gordys made the name their own and took great pride in it.

  When Berry Sr., the music producer’s father, known in Detroit as Pop Gordy, was a child, Jim Gordy, his white grandfather, was still alive but Berry never met him. Pop Gordy’s father was also named Berry Gordy, and both he and his wife were born a few years before emancipation. So Berry Gordy Jr.’s father, Pop Gordy, was the first generation not born into slavery. Pop Gordy was one of their twenty-three children, of which only nine survived to adulthood. They grew up in a log house in rural Oconee County, Georgia. Pop recalled lying in bed in the early morning, watching the sunrise through the cracks between the logs.

  Their father, Berry, taught himself how to read and write and make arithmetical calculations. He worked for ten years on a plantation, but from that work he scraped together enough money to buy 168 acres of land while his children were still young, and to produce and sell cotton, peanuts, sugarcane, and various food crops. Most of his neighbors were sharecroppers who worked a white man’s land and earned very little. Berry Gordy was respected by blacks and whites in the county as a successful black man.

  The Gordys were strongly influenced by Booker T. Washington, a man of the first Berry’s generation. Washington, too, was born a slave but he became a successful educator. Washington taught that black people should work hard, get educated, and strive for financial success. Their rights, in time, would come. He had a huge following among both blacks and whites, though many other black leaders, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, strongly disagreed. Du Bois and others believed that blacks could obtain their rights only by fighting for them through political activism. In the 1960s, when Berry Gordy Jr.’s Motown was an exemplary black-owned enterprise, this nineteenth-century debate between Washington and Du Bois was still a central conflict.

  The first Berry’s son, Pop Gordy, was an unusual child. When his siblings went off to play, he was staying close to his father, learning the business. When Pop was only ten, he went with his father to market and took on the job of calculating the value of the cotton they were selling. Pop attended school and also his father gave him books, including a law book, to study while the father’s holdings were ever expanding—another one hundred acres, a blacksmith shop, a big white house, a grocery store, and a sugar mill for their cane. Berry let his son operate the sugar mill. The Gordys were, in the local parlance, “big dogs.”

  In 1913 the father was suddenly struck dead by a bolt of lightning. White people immediately approached the family, offering their services as business advisers. This had been common practice in the South, to have white people manage black holdings. But, distrustful of the white offer, the family decided to name twenty-five-year-old Pop as the administrator. Whites constantly approached Pop with schemes to swindle him out of the holdings, but, consulting the law book his father had given him, he saw through all of the traps.

  Toward the end of World War I, Pop was drafted into the Army. Pop’s concern was that the family holdings would somehow be stolen while he was away, “’Cause I know the white people’d take that property.” His legs went bad, then his eyesight. He pretended to be illiterate. He played the racist stereotype and he was discharged after three months. Back home at age thirty, he married a smart and ambitious nineteen-year-old schoolteacher named Bertha.

  In 1922 Pop sold a load of timber stumps from the Gordy land for $2,600. This was more money than a black man was supposed to make in Oconee County, and the whites immediately plotted to get that money. Local whites had been annoyed and frustrated that they could not get the Berry holdings, but now this was too much. Pop understood that this was the game that was played. Often blacks would let themselves be swindled because it was too dangerous to frustrate whites. Black people could be murdered with impunity. Between 1882 and 1922, according to a research project by the University of Missouri–Kansas City Law School, 4,433 black people were lynched, mostly in the South. The rate had somewhat slowed but was still staggering. In 1921 there were sixty-four lynchings, whereas in the 1890s there were more than one hundred every year. Not infrequently, lynchings involved not only hanging but burning, dismemberment, and other forms of torture. Huge, festive crowds would turn out to watch. Most of these lynchings were of men accused of murder or rape, usually unproven, but almost a quarter, according to a famous study by the Tuskegee Institute, were for vague reasons, including a perceived insult to white people, peeping in a window, attempting to register to vote, or testifying against a white man. This meant that if a black person had any kind of dispute with a white person, the white had only to stir up an angry crowd and have his adversary hanged. Most of the charges had nothing to support them but one or two unverified accusations from white people. A black man’s word was never taken over any white man’s. All of the studies show that whatever the charges, in many cases the real motivation was that the black man had gained some economic advantage, which was resented. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, “The white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.” Poor white people saw a black man with a check for $2,600 as a threat, unless they could somehow re
lieve him of that money.

  One of Pop Gordy’s brothers had already taken a train north to Detroit, and Bertha convinced Pop that it was time to follow him. The Gordys were a rare example of a black family moving north because they had made too much money.

  • • •

  Berry Gordy Jr.’s own description of his family arriving in Detroit demonstrates how much in common their story had with those of American immigrants:

  Like so many other black people who migrated from the South in the twenties, Pop was filled with hope and dreams. He was thrilled to bring his family to this new world, leaving bigotry and hatred behind. There was a real competitive spirit among the people in Detroit, a determination that came from the need just to survive.

  But the typical life of a black immigrant in Detroit, renting a home and working on an automobile assembly line, was not acceptable to Pop. He had to own his own home and run his own business. This was the path to success advocated by Booker T. Washington. He started by selling whatever he could—ice, Christmas trees, car parts, fruit. A careful research of 1920s Detroit led him to choose a Westside neighborhood of home-owning, hardworking, churchgoing black people, most of whom were also from the rural South.

  On Thanksgiving Day 1929, a month after the stock market crash that launched the Great Depression, Berry Gordy Jr., the Gordys’ seventh child, was born. A year and a half later, the Gordys had their eighth and last child. In these difficult times Pop lost their house, the family went on welfare, and fixed up a small shack in the same neighborhood. Eight children slept in three beds. Late at night, young Berry would watch his father fight large rats in the kitchen, crushing them under his feet.

  The promised land, like all promised lands, was not all it was supposed to be.

  Racism was everywhere in Detroit, from Hudson’s, the leading downtown department store, owned by an automobile manufacturing family, which refused to have black sales personnel, to the Checker Cab company, which would not hire black drivers. Many downtown bars and restaurants would not serve black people. Even Henry Ford was a notorious racist, though he himself didn’t think so, using his own weekly newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, to publicize his racist theories about blacks and Jews. Detroit was also home in the 1930s to the pro-Nazi National Workers League.

  Yet years later, a wealthy success, Berry Gordy Jr. credited the “good fortune” of spending his first six years in Detroit’s Westside with its family-oriented community. “It was the place that gave me a sense of right and wrong, a sense of safety in the family, a sense of love and kinship in the community, where being good was actually a good thing to be.” Gordy said that up until the age of five, the only white person in the world he knew of was Santa Claus.

  According to Gordy, the two things every home had, no matter how poor, were a radio and an upright piano. Gordy learned to play theirs by ear, copying tunes he heard on the radio, although he never learned to read music well.

  With money he made from a job as an apprentice plasterer, which he eventually developed into his own plastering business, Pop started a small grocery store and named it after Booker T. Washington. They moved to the Eastside, where he bought a commercial building, and the family moved into the top two floors. Gordy said, “Coming to the Eastside was like moving from the country to the city.” Suddenly Gordy was no longer in a quiet community of houses and churchgoers but in a world of prostitutes and gambling and nightclubs wailing the blues. But the Booker T. Washington Grocery Store was a place where people in the neighborhood could spend time socializing, talking about business opportunities—a commercial place but also a warm and welcoming place and the center for the large Gordy family.

  Racial tensions grew during World War II, because while black migration continued, many of the wartime jobs were not open to them. About a quarter of the 185 defense-related factories in Detroit would not hire any blacks, and famously in 1943, when Packard, converted to a wartime defense plant, promoted three black workers to the aircraft assembly line, twenty-six thousand Packard plant workers walked off the job. Packard had had a policy of using blacks only for menial jobs.

  In the summer of 1943 fighting broke out between whites, mostly Polish and Appalachians on the Westside, and blacks, mostly immigrants from the South, living on the Eastside. Much of the violence consisted of whites attacking blacks. It continued for days until six thousand Federal troops were called in. Of the thirty-four people killed in the incident, twenty-five were black, and, according to a subsequent investigation, seventeen of the black deaths had been caused by the police.

  Yet the Gordys prospered in those years. While Pop pursued his business interests, including the Booker T. Washington Grocery Store, Bertha advanced her education and engaged in a variety of often socially minded businesses, such as the Friendship Mutual Insurance Company, which helped advance black enterprise in Detroit, and the Friends Club, founded in 1959, to raise money for the NAACP and even more radical civil rights groups such as CORE in its organizing efforts in Mississippi.

  The Gordys were role models, and not only for their children. In 1949 Color magazine ran an article with the headline “America’s Most Amazing Family: The Famous Gordys of Detroit Have What It Takes.” The article wrote of not only their business accomplishments but their various leisure activities, such as bowling and horseback riding and music. The children emulated their parents. George and Fuller worked in their father’s plastering business, while Esther started a printing company.

  But Berry wanted more. He wanted to be special. His earliest hero was Joe Louis, who when Gordy was seven years old, had knocked out James J. Braddock in the eighth round to become heavyweight champion of the world. At the time, the heavyweight champion was the most celebrated athlete in the world. Joe Louis was only the second black man to win that title, and the first to gain wide acceptance in the white world. His background was similar to the Gordys’: born in Alabama, he grew up in Detroit—and he became a hero not only in Detroit, not only in the black world, but in the broader world of blacks and whites, and this made an enormous impression on young Berry. He described it in his autobiography as “a burning desire to be special, to win, to be somebody.” Other childhood heroes were middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson and singer Nat King Cole. It is significant that these were all black men who had become popular in both the black and white world—crossover successes.

  Gordy started with boxing. In his junior year of high school, impatient to make his mark, he dropped out of school to become a professional boxer. As a result, he never read or wrote well. He was a small, square man, burly for his weight classes—bantamweight and featherweight, which are below 130 pounds. As a boxer, he was fairly successful. The high point of his career was a Friday-night fight on November 21, 1948, days before his nineteenth birthday, when he appeared on a card with Joe Louis as the main event. They both won their bouts.

  It is difficult to get attention and therefore big money in the smaller weight classes. Most people want to see heavyweights or middleweights. Gordy told this story about a hot August day in 1950, sitting in the gym, looking at two posters on pillars:

  The top poster announced a Battle of the Bands between Stan Kenton and Duke Ellington for the same night. The one below was advertising a bout between two young fighters scheduled for the following Friday night. There it was again. Boxing versus music. This time it was visual.

  I stared at both posters for some time, realizing fighters could fight once and maybe not fight again for three or four weeks, or months, or never. The bands were doing it every night, city after city, and not getting hurt. I then noticed the fighters were about twenty-three and looked fifty; the bandleaders about fifty and looked twenty-three.

  The genius of Barry Gordy Jr.—and genius seems the correct word for it—was rooted in the fact that he understood the unique value of his hometown. These newly urbanized immigrants were redefining black culture, which, in musical terms, meant aband
oning blues and developing R&B. Motown could not have been built anywhere but Detroit. It was based on what the city had to offer that had not yet been fully tapped. It could have been done in Chicago or New York or LA, but in those cities the music industry was already well organized. Detroit was a city of raw talent. Talent could be found literally on street corners and schoolyards. Kids learned music in school, sang it on the street, and famously sang in black churches and local clubs that sponsored amateur nights. Even with all this, Detroit had not developed independent record companies for young black artists.

  It was clear in Gordy’s mind. To escape the ordinary world and be a special person there were only two possible routes, and music was clearly the better one. He wrote songs that he never sold, and dreamed of being his other hero, Nat King Cole, except that he had what he termed “a voice problem.” He described his voice as sounding like a mixture of Cole, Billy Eckstine, and Donald Duck. He would try out his new songs on his siblings Fuller, Esther, and George, who would try to avoid the ceaseless performances by being very busy. Finally they produced Berry Gordy’s first song, “Let Gordy Be Your Printer Too.” The Gordys arranged for Berry to record it at a basement studio and air it on WJLB with Berry singing in an imitation Nat King Cole.

  Then he was drafted. His Army stint in wartime Korea, partly served as a noncombatant, he described as “a total disruption to my focus and goals.” He did, however, earn his high school diploma. In 1953, discharged from the Army, he returned to Detroit and his goals. In his parents’ view, he was the one child who was not accomplishing anything, and Pop hoped that on his return he would settle into the family plastering business. Instead, he borrowed money from Pop and got an investment from his brother George, who partnered with him in a record store. The records were to be jazz, because jazz was the music Berry loved. It was to remain a major influence on his career. Like many young blacks of his generation, he was contemptuous of blues, the old-time back-country music. But he loved the new bebop jazz of the 1950s: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Erroll Garner. Gordy called jazz “the only pure art form.”