Celebrating the return of two men from Vietnam, over eighty people had gathered when police roughly tried to close down the venue and began arresting all the patrons. The crowd that night refused to disperse and grew larger and more angry as morning dawned and the day went on. The police grew more forceful and violent as well.
Conyers arrived to try to disperse the crowd. “We couldn’t get people to disperse. . . . You could hear in the background sometimes windows being smashed and stores being looted. Houses were being set fire to. . . . People were letting feelings out that had never been let out before, that had been bottled up. . . . It was the whole desperate situation of being black in Detroit.”166 The crowd did not react well to Conyers’s entreaties, calling him an Uncle Tom and chanting “We want Stokely Carmichael.”
At the height of the unrest, the riot encompassed fourteen square miles, a full two hundred square blocks, of the city. Governor George Romney requested federal help, and late on the 24th, President Johnson agreed to send in 2,700 army paratroopers. The police responded violently against all blacks, not just those engaged in criminal acts. Tanks rolled through the streets of Detroit, and police and National Guardsmen were given wide latitude to “subdue” the riot by any means necessary, which often meant indiscriminately intimidating, arresting, and mistreating black residents. As Conyers explained, “What really went on was a police riot.”167 In a move that only served to increase the chaos, many officers shot out the streetlights. They raided apartments where supposed rioters were hiding, arresting and assaulting many uninvolved Detroiters.
During the riots, Vaughn’s bookstore was destroyed by police, who, according to historian James Smethurst, attacked it because it was a gathering place for black militants.168 Vaughn, out of town when the uprising started, returned the next day, feeling that “nothing would be wrong with my store, at least from the people, and of course I was correct.”169 Two days later, the police destroyed the shop. Firebombing the building, they mutilated the artwork, damaged many of the photographs and books, and left the water running, ruining the vast majority of books.170 Police maintained their actions were necessary because they had reports that guns were stored in the bookstore, but witnesses maintained that the attack was a hate crime.
Over seven thousand people were arrested during the uprising. So many people were arrested that police turned Belle Isle Park into a jail and held people in buses outside the court. Judge George Crockett refused to set high bail for these misdemeanors, letting people go on their own recognizance, unlike many of his colleagues, who set bail at $10,000.171 Perhaps the most egregious event came when police killed three young men in the Algiers Motel. While the officers reported a gun battle, no weapons were ever found, and witnesses said the young men were deliberately murdered. At the end of five days, forty-three people were dead—thirty at the hands of the police. Hundreds were injured, including eighty-five police officers. Property damage was estimated at $45 million, with 412 buildings completely burned. City officials were quick to call it a riot, in part because insurance policies with extended coverage covered the “perils of riot and civil commotion” but not insurrections.172 But parts of the city would never be rebuilt. In Virginia Park, after the riot, the city cut down the trees that lined many of the blocks.173
The Parkses home was near the uprising’s epicenter. They could see some of the fires and looting from their apartment “because we live right in the heart of the ghetto.”174 The uprising took a significant personal toll on the family. Raymond’s barbershop was looted, his haircutting equipment stolen, and their new car vandalized.175 Raymond was “just beside himself,” Parks recalled. “I had to spend most of my time trying to keep him as calm as possible.”176 In a 1980 interview, Parks recalled, “It was hard to keep my husband in. I had to drive him to get a shot, a sedative to quiet him down. One of the troopers threatened to hit him on the head with a rifle. This was right at our house. He was trying to watch the barbershop. He had a knife that a judge whose hair he took care of in Alabama had given him. And the trooper took it. He said that he always regretted that. It wasn’t something dangerous. That was pretty sad.”177 In another interview, she described Raymond having a nervous breakdown similar to what had happened during the bus boycott.
Conyers’s office, where Parks was working, became a crucial way station and complaint center during the uprising. Conyers recalled, “People were calling up reporting what the police were doing or did or reporting missing people, people wanting to file complaints. Fear [and] anger. Could this be happening in America.”178 Parks participated in many meetings, viewing the events partly as an outgrowth of the frustration at the continuing inequities in a putatively liberal city.179
Deeply saddened by the destruction, she attributed the uprising’s origins to the long history of white resistance to civil rights demands and rising anger among black youth. “[King’s] philosophy didn’t accomplish what it should have because the white Establishment would not accept his philosophy of nonviolence and respond to it positively. When the resistance grew, it created a hostility and bitterness among the younger people, who worked with him in the early days, when there was some hope that change could be accomplished through his means.”180 As one young black Detroiter explained, “For a change we have one voice saying that black people are not satisfied with the way that they have to live.”181
Mrs. Parks located the uprising in the context of white resistance and deafness to black grievances in Detroit. Ed Vaughn echoed this sentiment. “Everybody who cared, white and black, told them. They did not listen.”182 Historian Douglas Brinkley has argued that Parks believed the riot had “nothing to do with civil rights—it was pure hooliganism and she had little sympathy for its perpetrators.”183 However, in a number of interviews in the years right after the riot, Parks seems to have a more complex view than Brinkley asserts. In an interview two months after the riot, Parks put forward a class analysis of what underlay the uprising: “It could be understandable how they would resort to doing these things because they just hadn’t had the training and the background to feel that they should have patience when they see all of the wealth about them while they themselves are deprived of it. Everything now is geared to affluence, plenty, prosperity.”184 Parks explained the uprising as resulting both from the exclusion of black people from America’s postwar affluence and as part of a broader cultural ethos of consumption and accumulation that plagued American society in the 1960s.
Parks did not cast her years of activism or her protest on the bus as utterly distinct from the actions of the rioters. The city’s leadership along with the federal government tried to downplay the concerns and structural inequalities that fueled these disturbances. While never condoning random violence or theft and not seeing how it “was going to accomplish any good,” Parks could understand the uprising as “the result of resistance to change that was needed long beforehand.”185 She saw the ways that “the establishment of white people . . . will antagonize and provoke violence. When the young people want to present themselves as human beings and come into their own as men, there is always something to cut them down.”186 Emphasizing the ways that the violence of the riot had been “provoked” by systemic inaction, Parks stressed the ways that full American citizenship was tied to a decent standard of living and a publicly unbowed identity—which had been denied to these young men. In her reflections on the riot soon afterward, Parks thus was willing to contextualize people’s anger.
Many tried to ascribe the riots to the growing Black Power movements throughout the nation, casting a rising black militancy as a threat to the legacy of the civil rights movement and blaming it for the violence on display in riots across the country. In a five-part series in the Detroit News, black journalist Louis Lomax fingered six activists in the city—James and Grace Lee Boggs, Reverend Cleage, Milton Henry, Richard Henry, and Ed Vaughn—as spearheading a dangerous Black Power militancy that bore partial responsibility for the climate that produced the rio
t. Parks, though, felt differently: “If you looked beneath the surface, we could see the frustration of some of these people. . . . I guess for whatever reasons it came about, I felt that something had to be wrong with the system.”187 Dispirited by the riots, she nonetheless observed, “Regardless of whether or not any one person may know what to do about segregation and oppression, it’s better to protest than to accept injustice.”188 While many decried the violence as senseless and self-inflicted, Roger Wilkins of the U.S. Justice Department, who had gone to Detroit and was nearly killed by National Guardsmen, took a view similar to that of Parks. He saw the riots as “a jagged plea to the political system: Pay attention to us, we’re left out, we ache. In a sense it was a hopeful scream.”189
In late August, Conyers publicly called for a Full Opportunity Act—a $30 billion aid program guaranteeing every citizen a job, raising the minimum wage, promoting massive construction of low-income housing, enacting a comprehensive college loan program, and stepping up enforcement of nondiscrimination in housing, schools, and jobs “both in the North and the South.”190 The plan garnered little national support.
Locally, the Citizens City-wide Action Committee (CCAC) stepped into the fray. CCAC was a grassroots, citywide movement of black militants and nationalists of various stripes chaired by Christian nationalist Reverend Cleage. Many black Detroiters were dismayed when the officers involved in the Algiers Motel killings escaped indictment. Angered by the police cover-up, young radicals led by Dan Aldridge and Lonnie Peek were inspired by H. Rap Brown’s call for “a people’s tribunal” when he addressed a crowd of five thousand at Detroit’s Dexter Theater. They had hoped the city’s newspapers would make a full inquiry into the events, but a sympathetic reporter, according to Aldridge, found his story quashed by his editors.191 So, in the absence of an indictment of the cops or substantive media attention to the case, they decided to hold a tribunal as a way to air a fuller version of the events to the community. “Watch accurate justice administered by citizens of the community,” a CCAC flier announced. “Witness the unbiased, legal action of skilled black attorneys. Review and watch the evidence for yourself.”
The “People’s Tribunal” was held at Cleage’s church on August 30, 1967. It had originally been scheduled for the Dexter Theater, but the theater backed out. According to Cleage, it was held in his church because there were fears that the police would attack any other place. The church’s executive board made a public statement attesting to its reasons for holding it there: “We love our church and the building in which we worship. But even if granting permission for the People’s Tribunal to be held here means the destruction of the building, as churches have been destroyed in Birmingham and all over the South, we still have no choice.”192 The trial was held under an eighteen-foot image of the Black Madonna that Cleage had installed on Easter Sunday 1967. Painted by Detroit artist Glanton Dowdell, the portrait depicted a dark-skinned mother cradling an equally dark infant. Cleage explained the significance of the powerful image—to “have come so far that we can conceive of the Son of God being born of a black woman.”193 Attendance at the church—which came to be known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna—skyrocketed after the uprising.194
The tribunal gave a grieving black community a people’s trial, which had been denied them by the compromised legal process. Those gathered heard the case against three white Detroit police officers, Ronald August, Robert Paille, and David Sendak, and a black security guard charged in what witnesses called the “execution” of three young black men—Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard, and Fred Temple—at the Manor House annex of the Algiers Motel on July 26, 1967, the fourth day of the uprising.
Over two thousand people packed the church, with others trying to get in.195 Journalists from France and Sweden covered the event. Attorney Milton R. Henry served as one of the two prosecutors; Solomon A. Plapkin, a white attorney, and Central Church member Russell L. Brown Jr. acted as defense counsel. Kenneth V. Cockrel Sr., a recent Wayne law school graduate and future cofounder of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW), was the judge and moderator. The stenographer was Central Church member Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, who would later be elected to Congress. They called witnesses to the events to give accounts of what they saw; because the police sought to intimidate the witnesses, the organizers tried to keep them hidden until they testified.
Among the people selected to be jurors were African American novelist John O. Killens, Edward Vaughn, and Rosa Parks. Dan Aldridge had asked Parks to serve as a juror because of her reputation in the community as a person of integrity, and she had agreed.196 Mrs. Parks’s willingness to take part in the Tribunal took great courage and fortitude, according to Dorothy Aldridge. They both knew Carl Cooper’s family.197 So the police killings at the Algiers Motel were not just a community outrage but a personal tragedy for a family that Mrs. Parks knew. Shaken by Cooper’s killing, Raymond’s breakdown, and the destruction in her neighborhood, Rosa Parks put aside her personal difficulties and maintained her composure in the service of this community hearing.
The jury found the officers guilty of murder. Cockrel urged that the sentence should be carried out by “the people.”198 “There is no way to put down on paper the sheer horror of the recital of events,” Cleage would write in the Michigan Chronicle. “It is hard to believe . . . that a group of ordinary white men could so hate ordinary black men.”199 Given its organizers and leaders, Parks’s participation in the People’s Tribunal shows how she was located firmly in the midst of an emerging militancy in the city.
Right after the uprising, living so close to its epicenter, Mrs. Parks took part in the formation of the Virginia Park District Council to help rebuild the area and promote local economic development. The council helped facilitate the building of a shopping center, the Virginia Park community plaza shopping center, which broke ground in 1981, one of the only community-owned black shopping developments in the country. The Virginia Park block club focused on rehabilitation and affordable housing, with a commitment to rebuilding and empowering the neighborhood. Martha Norman Noonan and other friends formed the People’s Food Co-op, which Parks joined immediately, supportive of cooperative buying. According to Aldridge, Mrs. Parks was a locavore decades before its time and dedicated to healthy eating. Her brother kept a huge garden, where they cultivated fresh fruits and vegetables.200 Parks canned and preserved foods and, her niece recounted how her aunt often taught other people how to preserve food, so they might also stretch their food supply and not waste anything.201
In 1969, Parks’s friend Louise Tappes succeeded in getting Twelfth Street—“where the civil disturbances began”—changed to Rosa Parks Boulevard.202 The city council rescinded a law forbidding the naming of streets for living persons in order to honor Parks. The symbolic meaning of Twelfth Street would forever be linked to, if also transformed by, Rosa Parks.
The last time Mrs. Parks saw Dr. King was in a place where most whites continued to fight to maintain their racial privilege—the exclusive Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. On March 14, three weeks before his assassination, King came to speak at Grosse Pointe South High School, and Parks and a friend went out to hear him. The school board had debated for months whether to allow the event to be held there and relented only after organizers took out an extra $1 million insurance policy. “There was a horrible mess when he tried to speak out there,” she explained. “They disrupted the meeting. . . . It was an all-white city.”203 Fearing assassination, the police chief actually sat on King’s lap as they drove up to the school. In the press conference afterward, King observed that it was the most disruption he ever faced in an indoor meeting.204 Parks was unsure, however, that King even knew she was there. “I got close enough to wave but I don’t think he saw me. . . . It was just so crowded,” she recalled.205
King’s speech, “The Other America,” focused on the economic inequalities corroding American society. He put Detroit’s recent uprising in the broader context of racial ineq
uality in the city and throughout the nation.
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. . . . A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.206
Like Parks, King saw the roots of the riots lying in white indifference and intransigence to black demands for justice, equality, and real economic opportunity and challenged the blinders of Northern liberalism. Like King and many of her comrades in Detroit, Rosa Parks had grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of fundamental change. Fresh energy and strategies were needed—and Mrs. Parks welcomed a new generation of freedom fighters to the struggle.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Any Move to Show We Are Dissatisfied”
Mrs. Parks in the Black Power Era
STANDING UP TO WHITE TERROR and intimidation from Scottsboro to the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks “always felt it was my right to defend myself if I could.”1 Having long believed in self-defense, she was a steadfast critic of racism in the criminal justice system and a proponent of the far-reaching social change necessary to ensure real black equality. “I’m in favor of any move to show that we are dissatisfied,” she told an interviewer in 1964. “We still haven’t received our rights as citizens.”2 To her, black demands often got mired in delay to give the appearance of progress without committing to actual change. “As long as we formed little committees,” Parks recalled, “and went to the bus company and asked to be treated like human beings and continued to travel on the bus nothing happened.”3 Increasingly frustrated by the languid pace of change, she chafed under the regular admonitions from white moderates that black people were demanding too much. In 1967 she told an interviewer, “I don’t believe in gradualism or that whatever should be done for the better should take forever to do.”4
The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks Page 30
