With a police escort clearing the way, the official party moved swiftly into the city and down to the Sheraton Cadillac at the corner of Michigan and Washington, skirting crowds already massing along Woodward. King washed up, changed clothes, and relaxed in his suite while granting a brief interview to a reporter from the Free Press. Dressed “somberly in black,” he talked about his Oval Office meeting with President Kennedy the previous day at which they discussed the administration’s civil rights bill. Alluding to the Walk to Freedom that was about to take place on the streets of Detroit, King also stressed how vital mass protests were in pushing the cause, an idea not exactly endorsed by JFK. “The president solicited our support of his legislation. He wants Negroes to mobilize to help pass the bill,” King said. “The president told me some congressmen feel this would be more harmful than helpful. I insisted it would not be harmful. He expressed concern over the fact that some demonstrations have led to violence. I told him the demonstrations have been amazingly nonviolent and it was spectators and others who were violent.”
By “others” King was referencing Bull Connor and other southern officers of the law who had been upholding Jim Crow segregation through violent means. Proof that Detroit would be different went deeper than the protective assignment of Lieutenant Harge. Edwards had devoted significant time and attention to how his department would handle the march. By haunting coincidence, this very week marked the twentieth anniversary of the violent race riot that wounded Detroit in 1943, when Edwards was on the city council, a progressive shaken to his core by that deadly reminder of man’s inhumanity to man. Two decades later, he wanted to minimize the possibility that his officers would provide a spark. “I want this event to be peaceful and happy,” he told Paul Sheridan, the Central Station inspector placed in charge of the parade detail. “I want you to talk to every one of your details personally. Tell them we expect no trouble. Tell them to leave their clubs in the station house, and Paul, tell them all the time they are on Woodward Avenue to smile.” At roll call that day, Sheridan dutifully passed along the sentiments of his boss, along with this written reminder: “It is no secret that we can never retract a spoken word, so you are hereby instructed at this time to be absolutely certain that any conversation had by you at any time you are on this detail shall be strictly in the best police manner possible.”
With the marchers expected to be predominantly African American, all available black officers were assigned to the event, but that still amounted to only twenty, a minuscule percentage of the five hundred–plus detail that included two deputy inspectors, eight lieutenants, twenty-eight sergeants, twenty-three detectives, and 452 patrolmen. Edwards wanted no trouble, but he also wanted the means to respond if trouble arose. His biggest fear was not that his force would misbehave but that antimarch hecklers might appear along the route. Hate mail was already starting to pile up in his office. Just in case, he had one hundred commandos stationed in the garage at 1300 Beaubien, out of sight but connected by open line to Cobo Arena, where the rally was to end.
An event that six weeks earlier was no more than C. L. Franklin’s hazy idea and had been on the verge of collapse many times during the contentious planning stages, was now becoming a reality beyond even the extravagant reverend’s imagining. It seemed that everybody and everything were cooperating, even the weather. The early summer sun radiated in a high blue sky. Franklin’s Detroit Council for Human Rights had evolved into a vibrant coalition joining forces for this day, from the Jewish Community Council to the Roman Catholic archdiocese, from the United Auto Workers to a group of local Teamsters, from the Urban League to—reluctantly, but in the end demonstrably—the NAACP, from New Bethel Baptist to Plymouth Congregational, from the Booker T. Washington Business Association to the Wolverine Bar Association, from the Conant Gardens Property Owners Association to the Cortland Block Club, from the Detroit Police Department Band to the Cass Tech Marching Band.
Churches, schools, social clubs, civic groups, small businesses, labor unions—all had their own marshals and armbands and signs and staging areas in a twenty-one-block area off Woodward that stretched north along the avenue from Adelaide to the intersection with Warren several blocks below Wayne State and the Detroit Institute of Arts, about three miles away from the final destination at the riverside arena. At first the march had been scheduled to start at four, then it was moved up to three, but by as early as noon the staging areas were throbbing with energized masses eager to pick up their feet. Early crowds became so thick around Hudson’s in the Woodward shopping district that horses from the Police Mounted Bureau were diverted from their original mission there and clip-clopped down to the more spacious areas near Cobo to pull traffic duty. The optimistic talk beforehand was of bringing out 100,000 people; now it would be that and more, from a quarter again more to twice that many, depending on who did the counting.
The march had begun prematurely by the time King and his entourage left the hotel. An early platoon had already reached the corner of Woodward and Michigan at Campus Martius when the limo carrying King and Edwards approached. As the two men emerged from the backseat, thinking they had missed half the procession and should get to the front, a raucous shout—“There he is!”—sent a swarm toward King with the exuberance that would overwhelm him the rest of the day.
Some people started singing “God Bless America” as he took to the street. But just then Edwards heard on his radio that the other leaders of the march were waiting for them back at the Adelaide starting point. He motioned to King, who swiftly retreated with him into the limo, their faces shrouded by tinted windows as the vehicle maneuvered the back streets to get to where they were supposed to be. Fifteen minutes later, King and Edwards took their places in the front line, locking arms with C. L. Franklin, Charles Diggs, Benjamin McFall, Albert Cleage, James Del Rio, James Swainson, and Walter Reuther and taking the first steps forward, a mass of humanity behind them, eight lanes wide, nearly a mile deep, as they moved down Woodward Avenue on the Walk to Freedom. Mayor Cavanagh marched with other dignitaries in the second row, directly behind King. Del Rio, who was in charge of arrangements, later claimed that he had assigned Cavanagh to the tenth row but the ambitious mayor had elbowed his way up. Possible but unlikely. Del Rio proved to be an unreliable narrator, also later asserting that the march was more than twice as large as the most generous estimates. What his claim about Cavanagh revealed, if nothing else, was the sentiment he shared with Reverend Cleage: this was to be a black-oriented event not overshadowed by white leaders. The enormity of the march made that concern seem inconsequential, just as it overwhelmed all of the infighting leading up to that moment.
The surge behind Reuther and Franklin and King was so great that they all described being lifted off their feet and carried forward as if pushed by a great torrent. Erma Franklin recalled, “There were so many people it was almost like you were kind of scared to get in there, or you got there and there were that many people and then say ten minutes later you look behind you and you couldn’t see the end of the line!” The size and velocity of the crowd made it seem “as if a huge dam had burst,” reported the Detroit News. At some point the mayor’s wristwatch fell off and was trampled by the advancing army. There was so much noise and commotion around the leaders that talking was futile. Shouts of “Hang on! Hang on!” reverberated down the line. Del Rio held up a bullhorn and shouted “Back off! Back off!” to no avail. Lieutenant Harge and another black officer, Sergeant Tetrault, tried to protect King and his cohort, walking directly behind them, but were pushed around with everyone else. Harge became winded. From no ill intent, just the force of the moment, Tetrault was knocked to the ground, scraping his hands and knees. If you got pushed out of line, the best way to get back in place was to race through a relatively empty alley paralleling Woodward and try to meet the wave again as it rolled down the avenue. People were singing all along the route, alternately somber and joyous as they went through the verses of “We Shall Overcome” and “The B
attle Hymn of the Republic.” There were signs everywhere: Time is Running Out; Let’s Move to Grosse Pointe; I’m Ashamed I Live in Dearborn; Don’t Tread on Me, White Man; Detroit Needs Strong Housing Laws; UAW Supports Pres. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Program; Evers Died for You; Stop Jim Crow; Fight for Freedom; Down with Segregation.
Some of those signs, quite noticeably, displayed five letters at the top: NAACP. This was the Machiavellian work of Arthur Johnson, executive director of the Detroit chapter, a group that had no role in planning the march and spent considerable time beforehand diminishing its importance, with some of its members forcefully trying to scuttle it and feuding with Reverend Franklin. “As the excitement about the march grew in the community, we understood that it was bound to be a milestone for the city and the nation,” Johnson explained later. “We supported the march but had to recognize that we did not have leadership participation in it. Because the branch was at the forefront of all the issues of segregation, discrimination, and police brutality, not being a part of this landmark civil rights event particularly concerned me, and I knew that I had to do something to advance the NAACP’s interest.” That something, Johnson decided, would be thousands of placards with “NAACP” printed on them for people to carry on the march. He found a silkscreen company that could handle the order for $750 and called a closed-door meeting of his executive committee, which endorsed his plan and agreed to keep it secret. Early on the morning of the march he and an aide brought the placards to the staging areas and spread the word that anyone could carry them. “Within minutes,” Johnson noted, “all one thousand signs were gone.” If Franklin was upset by the maneuver, he never mentioned it; there was too much going his way at the moment for him to bother with the unbrotherly cageyness. Even the outspoken Cleage let it go, for once.
What does a march signify in the larger scheme of things? It does not do the work of legislation, changing the laws and norms of society. It does not promise a transformative effect on an individual life, nor a lasting impact on a city, the way that education can, or money, smart leadership, community responsibility, or an effective social program. A march is ephemeral and symbolic. When stripped bare, it is nothing more than a parade of people. But that does not render it meaningless. In retrospect, the Walk to Freedom on that fine June day can seem hollow, considering all that was to happen in and to Detroit in the following years, from the 1967 riot to the decline and fall toward bankruptcy a half century later. But a moment like that collapses time and represents its own reality, apart from the day to day, transcending the harsh judgment of literal and practical perspectives. No one who participated in the march forgot it, and as they moved eight lanes down Woodward toward Cobo they carried with them stories that were defined and deepened by the events of that day—and that its aftermath could not diminish.
Rev. Nicholas Hood of Plymouth Congregational, an establishment institution not inclined toward political demonstrations, found himself leading nearly a hundred members of his church who had surprised him by turning out for the march. Plymouth was just then emerging from a difficult eight-year stretch of dislocation and disillusionment precipitated in part by the mayoral administrations of Jerome Cavanagh’s predecessors, Republicans Albert Cobo and Louis Miriani. The congregation’s old church, a former synagogue, had been demolished as part of the urban renewal that leveled wide swaths of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley to make way for hospitals, parking lots, and the Chrysler Freeway. Hood always tried to look on the positive side—he called himself “a bridge builder, not a bridge burner”—but he considered urban renewal, or “Negro removal,” the most overt indication that “there was a total disregard for anything black in this community.” Before the bulldozers came, he was shown a detailed planning map of a three-hundred-acre area that identified properties block by block yet failed to indicate the presence of black churches, of which there were more than a dozen.
One way his church reacted was by saying, as he put it, “Yes, urban renewal is Negro removal, but we’re going to make it work for us.” He fought for the right to rebuild in the same area and to surround his new church with affordable housing, a rarity in the renewal zones. The other way he reacted was by getting more political. The wave that brought Cavanagh into office in 1961, defeating Miriani in an upset, was largely powered by black voters. Hood now contemplated a role in city politics himself, a possibility that he said came in part because of King and the civil rights movement rolling across the South. The movement, Hood said later, not only challenged Jim Crow segregation; it also awakened and emboldened northern blacks to action on their home turf.
As he took his place in a staging area several blocks behind King and the leadership row, his two young sons tagging along, Hood looked out in wonder, thinking to himself, Where did all these people come from? Establishment black churches like his had not organized the march. The NAACP was not behind it. But the black citizens of Detroit had clearly rallied, whatever their affiliation. “They had been pent-up for so long,” Hood recalled. “And when King asked them to do something, they were happy to get out on the street. They could sing and dance. I led my church out there, singing to the top of our voices. It was a joyous experience. We sang all the way. It was bigger than the Thanksgiving Day parade. I had never seen anything like it, just unbelievable. But I think part of it was the pent-up emotion. These were peace-loving people. These were not people throwing Molotov cocktails and that kind of foolishness. People who just wanted an opportunity to express themselves. Where are they coming from? Where are they coming from? Everywhere.”
A block or so in front of Hood and his contingent were Booker Moten and his Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity pledgemates. Moten was eighteen, a freshman at Wayne State, and an amateur photographer who wanted to capture the day on film as part of his portfolio of his hometown. He had grown up near Outer Drive in the southernmost point of Detroit’s west side but was smart enough to get accepted at Cass Tech near downtown, where one of his classmates was Diane Ross (before she became Diana), who lived in the Brewster projects. Race was a constant topic of conversation at church and at the dinner table, led by his father, Pops Booker, who had arrived in Detroit with a master’s degree in mathematics but had to take a job as a busboy at the YMCA. At the center of the discussion was housing and the demographics of the city. “In the black community housing segregation was so distinct that we knew block by block when a black family moved into a new neighborhood,” Moten recalled. “That was always news in black society.” Jobs and housing had been the fundamental problems, along with difficult relations with police, but by the time Moten reached college he was looking at how racial issues played out beyond his own experience. At the time of the march, he and his friends were talking about boycotting the local Kresge’s in sympathy with lunch-counter protests in the Jim Crow South. Like Reverend Hood, he felt that King and the southern movement empowered his northern cohort as well. They talked that month about picketing theaters showing Cleopatra, a movie just being released with Elizabeth Taylor in the lead role. “We were developing a growing black sensibility about a white woman playing an African queen,” he said. “That sort of racial consciousness permeated students in the city of Detroit.”
Moten started the day walking from the center of the Wayne State campus a mile above the official starting point. The crowds grew “bigger and bigger and bigger” as they moved south, making him feel part of something larger, a massive flow of energy that could not be denied. But the full historical weight came to him mostly in retrospect. As part of their fraternity pledging, Moten and his classmates were assigned a uniform of sorts, required to dress all in white from head to toe. They looked like vendors, and this is what he would remember most clearly: “We were in white shirts, white pants. And so on this hot day, wearing all white, people kept coming up to me looking to buy ice cream or sodas.”
In the crowd nearby walked Ron Scott, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Northwestern High who came out of the Jeffries Housing Projects near
the Lodge Freeway. His family first lived in Black Bottom between Gratiot and the river, but urban renewal pushed them from that neighborhood. They moved up near Hastings Street, but the Chrysler Freeway renewal bounced them back to Jeffries. Scott, who later would help found the Detroit chapter of the Black Panthers and evolve into a television producer and media personality in the city, had his political consciousness awakened in the projects, inspired first by an activist who lived there, Lois Williams, who worked for Congressman Diggs, and then by hanging around the Wayne State campus with his pal Mike Evans. He cited one other experience in shaping his perspective: a day late in 1960 when he and an uncle were stopped by police during a citywide stop-and-search crackdown on crime that essentially turned all blacks on the street into suspects. Black crime, white cops—that was the difficult mix. The Detroit News and Free Press in the winter of 1960–1961 reported that blacks committed 65 percent of all crimes in Detroit even though they were not quite 30 percent of the population. Most of those crimes were black on black, but two murders of white women dominated the coverage and ignited the police action. As Scott recounted it, a cop put a shotgun to his face and said, “Nigger, if you move I’ll blow your head off.”
Once in a Great City Page 18
