Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  IN THE HISTORY of the counterculture, the summer of 1967 is remembered as the Summer of Love, after the hippie celebration in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. That was the title of a section in Rolling Stone’s fortieth-anniversary issue, profiling the most fertile music scenes of the magazine’s birth year: New York, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Memphis, and Detroit.

  The Summer of Love may have missed Detroit, but Detroit belonged on that list. From its founding in 1960 to the end of 1966, Motown Records had produced fourteen number one hits, most of them by the Supremes, whose showcase singer, Diana Ross, was a graduate of Cass Technical High School (later the alma mater of the White Stripes’ Jack White). Motown’s impresario, Berry Gordy Jr., had worked on the line at Ford, and it has been suggested that he transferred the principles of automotive assembly to assembling hit records, employing separate work crews of songwriters (Eddie Holland Jr., Lamont Dozier, and Brian Holland), singers (the Temptations, Smokey Robinson), and backup musicians (the Funk Brothers). Gordy may have organized his business like Henry Ford, but that was not the auto industry’s main contribution to Motown’s success. Gordy’s genius was selling black musicians to white audiences. Detroit’s auto plants were a destination for white hillbillies and black sharecroppers, who couldn’t help but appreciate each other’s music.

  Wayne Kramer, the guitarist for Detroit’s punk rock progenitors the MC5, learned his instrument from a Southern-born stepfather who serenaded Kramer’s mother with Ferlin Husky, Webb Pierce, Eddy Arnold, and the bluegrass standard “Mountain Dew.” Then he turned on the radio and listened to John Lee Hooker, Koko Taylor, and Albert Collins.

  “The cultural mix as it played out in music in Detroit in the fifties and the sixties and up into maybe halfway through the seventies was unique in the world in its self-referentiality and incestuousness,” said Kramer. “If you grew up in Detroit in the fifties and sixties, you listened to the radio. Radio was huge and you had a broad choice. If you wanted to find soul music and real rhythm and blues, you could find it. That’s what I would listen to a great deal. There were country stations that were very hard-core country. I was attracted to rhythm and blues. It had a rawness and a passion that you didn’t hear in Bobby Vinton. Even the mainstream stations would play a soul record and certainly they played all the Motown hits.”

  Kramer added another genre to his musical education when he met jazzheads Rob Tyner and John Sinclair. Tyner became the lead singer of the MC5. Sinclair, who had migrated to Detroit from Flint and published the counterculture newspaper Fifth Estate, became the band’s manager and apparatchik. The MC5 started out playing in parks and at teen clubs, living and rehearsing in a rock and roll collective called the Trans-Love Commune. They developed a sound derived from the industrial cacophony of the city around them: drumbeats at the driving tempo of an assembly line, electric guitars amplified to the volume of 425 cc motorcycle engines. The MC5 became the house band at the Grande Ballroom, Detroit’s answer to San Francisco’s Fillmore. While Detroit embraced the MC5, the MC5 turned out to be a less successful export than Motown. Their aggressive sound was out of tune with the psychedelic music popular with most hippies. As a result, they bombed outside the industrial Midwest.

  “It may have something to do with a kind of anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism,” Kramer theorized. “If you just walked up, first impression, you’d say, ‘These guys are insane and they’re coming on too strong.’ It might be off-putting. Europe, we were just too raw for them. They kind of evidenced a more refined sensibility.”

  Kramer eventually got his due—Rolling Stone placed him at number 92 on its “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” list, and he’s considered a grandfather of punk. But during the Summer of Love, the rest of America was listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Byrds. If the MC5’s sound was ahead of its time in its violence, its aggressiveness, and its despair, it could be because Detroit was ahead of its time in those qualities, too.

  MAYOR CAVANAGH BELIEVED he was in step with this multiracial Detroit. His upset campaign had been supported by blacks furious about a “crackdown” by Mayor Louis Miriani that resulted in police swarming into their neighborhoods and patting down law-abiding homeowners. The blacks, not yet numerous enough to elect one of their own but numerous enough to defeat a racist mayor, adopted the slogan “Phooey on Louie.” The press dubbed the new mayor “Jerry the Giant Killer.” Cavanagh named blacks to his cabinet and integrated the police force, whose white officers had staged a ticket-writing strike when forced to share squad cars with black patrolmen. President Johnson showered Detroit with Model Cities grants, hoping to make it the Midwestern front of his War on Poverty. If Cavanagh had been closer to the streets, he might have heard about the “Big Four,” a quartet of white cops with a reputation for kicking black ass. If he’d attended one of the monthly meetings held by the East Side’s state senator, Coleman Young, he might have heard that Young’s constituents thought of the police as “prison guards” whose job was “to keep the damn blacks away from the whites at all costs and what they did to themselves was their problem.” But in the summer of 1967, Detroit’s establishment believed that no black community in America was less likely to riot.

  THE UNITED COMMUNITY LEAGUE for Civic Action had its headquarters in an office above a print shop on Twelfth Street. During election years, the black empowerment organization paid its rent through the largesse of politicians. But 1967 was not an election year, so the group covered its bills by operating a blind pig, throwing weekend parties featuring beer, craps, and dancing. On Saturday night, the twenty-third of July, eighty-five people gathered to celebrate the homecoming of two Vietnam veterans. The police had already raided the club twice. At three forty-five in the morning, they smashed the glass door with a sledgehammer and raced up the stairs. They were surprised by the number of revelers, and by the reaction of the doorman, William Walter Scott III, whose father and uncle operated the establishment.

  “The club! Those goddamn peckerwoods are going to raid the club again!” hollered Scott, who would later take credit for inciting the riot in a book titled Hurt, Baby, Hurt.

  Because of the party’s size, the police had to call for three extra squadrols to take everyone to jail. And because the rear door of the club was padlocked and led to a blind alley, they had to lead the arrestees onto Twelfth Street, in full view of wee-hours partiers who saw the police kicking, punching, and clubbing their haul. On one of the hottest nights of the year, the street was already crowded. Once word of a bust spread through the neighborhood, it filled up even more. The crowd taunted the police with racial epithets: “Go home, whitey. Why don’t you go fuck with white people?” And, as the cops dragged prisoners into wagons: “They can walk. Let them walk, you white sons of bitches.” While the police kept the hostile blacks at bay with nightsticks, Scott jumped onto a car, shouting, “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherfuckers come down here any time they want and mess us around?” Scott then ran into an alley, picked up a bottle, and threw it at a cop. It missed, but Scott had launched the first missile of the Detroit riot. As bottles, bricks, and sticks dented retreating police cars, the mob celebrated its conquest of Twelfth Street by breaking the window of a clothing store and helping itself to brand-new wardrobes.

  “For the first time in our lives, we felt free,” Scott would write. “It was a free day for everybody to do and be what we wanted, regardless of the world and its laws.”

  ALMOST ALL THE LOOTERS were black, but to this day, Detroiters insist what happened was not a race riot. It was a class riot, an outburst by people fed up with merchants overcharging them for spoiled meat and lumpy mattresses, fed up with being too poor to buy the clothes and the jewelry they saw advertised on TV—or too poor even to buy a TV. Most of the shops on Twelfth Street were owned by suburban Jews. The rioters cleaned out all their inventory, then set the buildings on fire. The days were black with smoke, the nights red with flames.

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sp; The Detroit Free Press inventoried the looting: “They took fur stoles and floor maps, diamond rings and dresses, wigs, hamburger, color TV sets; shotguns, cameras, records, cigarettes, soda pop, lamps, toasters, shoes, underwear, guitars, two-pants suits, and $8 scotch and skinless hot dogs.”

  Skylarking looters partied in the streets with stolen beer, booze, and cigarettes. They were serenaded by musicians playing guitars from music stores stripped of all their instruments and all their jazz records, but none of their classical collections. Unlike in 1943, whites who strayed into the riot zone were mostly ignored. Some even joined the pillage. When the disorder spread east, to Chene Street, mixed mobs of blacks, Poles, and Italians smashed the plate-glass windows and joined forces to carry off couches and twenty-five-inch TVs. Furious shopkeepers recognized old customers enjoying the retail holiday.

  The police were too poorly armed to protect firefighters from the rooftop snipers. Armed with newly acquired pawnshop rifles, the snipers took potshots at trucks attempting to douse the fires set that Sunday. Governor George Romney declared a state of emergency, banned gasoline sales, and called in the National Guard, which arrived in the city with tanks, rifles, and jeeps to relieve police stations under attack by urban guerillas. Auto plants canceled shifts as terrified employees refused to report to work. A nightclub advertised a singing engagement that would begin “after the emergency.” Front-porch vigilantes with .22-caliber rifles offered themselves as a security force for the fire department. Black merchants painted “SOUL BROTHER” on their windows, but the temptation of the goods inside was often more powerful than racial solidarity. Detroit Tigers outfielder Willie Horton, who had grown up near Twelfth Street, raced to the neighborhood after Sunday’s doubleheader against the Yankees, not even stopping to change out of uniform. The Tigers’ home stand against the Orioles was postponed. The teams finally played the third game in Baltimore.

  When the farm boys of the National Guard couldn’t restore order, Romney reluctantly requested federal assistance. The Republican governor waited until Monday morning to ask the president for help: he was planning to run against Johnson in 1968 and did not want to look like a man who couldn’t keep order in his own state. For his part, Johnson was reluctant to send in the army. If he dispatched federal troops to Detroit, wouldn’t every governor with a riot on his hands call the White House? Street warfare against American citizens was not the army’s purpose. But Johnson was also in a fix: this was the third major riot on his watch, after Watts and Newark, and he had to show white voters he could protect them from black violence.

  The president sent 4,700 paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, then scored a political point during a nationally televised speech: “Governor Romney of Michigan and the local officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under control.” It was the first time since the 1943 Detroit riot that federal troops had been called out to quell civil disorder. By the time the soldiers arrived on Tuesday, the riot was entering its third day, nearing the end of its life cycle. On Twelfth Street, a Jewish merchant stood in the wreckage of his clothing and variety store, looted of $20,000 in merchandise on a block burned, in the words of a Free Press reporter, to “a blackened shell and a vast pit of twisted wreckage, smoldering fires, and foul, stagnant water seeping higher up the basement walls.” The shopkeeper’s insurance had been canceled because his underwriter considered Detroit a riot risk.

  “I’m sixty-three,” the man said. “At this age, I lost everything. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  On Chene Street, storekeepers reopened just long enough to collect insurance payments, then sold out as quickly as they could, often to Chaldeans—Iraqi Christians—who opened corner groceries and party stores.

  “Chene was a stable, mixed neighborhood until the riots,” recalled lifelong resident John Givans, who was born in 1961 and spent his earliest years among Slavic neighbors. “We went to West Virginia that summer and when we came back, the National Guard was in Perrien Park. There was a tank on Chene Street.”

  Forty-three people died in the last week of July, most of them looters shot by police or soldiers. In the infamous Algiers Motel Incident, which became the subject of a book by Hiroshima author John Hersey, three black youths were executed by police who mistook them for snipers. Detroit 1967 was America’s deadliest civil disturbance until the Los Angeles riot, twenty-five years later.

  John Lee Hooker, Detroit’s greatest bluesman, memorialized the riot in a mournful song:

  Ohhh, the Motor City is burning

  It ain’t a thing in the world that I can do …

  My hometown is burning down to the ground

  Worse than Vietnam

  But the riot itself is less interesting than its aftermath. It was the B.C./A.D. week in Detroit’s three-century history. After it was over, Mayor Cavanagh visited Twelfth Street, declaring sorrowfully, “We stand here amid the ashes of our hopes.” In the 1960s, black ghettos burned in other big cities—Los Angeles; Chicago; Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.—but none of those riots had the consequences of Detroit’s. Beforehand, Detroit had been losing about twenty-thousand white residents to the suburbs each year, a normal rate of defection for a Northern city. The year after the riot, eighty thousand whites left Detroit, for suburbs with well-established policies of keeping out the colored. Dearborn mayor Orville Hubbard stood astride Telegraph Road, his border with Detroit, as obdurately as George Wallace had stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama.

  “They can’t get in here,” Hubbard boasted to an interviewer. “Every time we hear of a Negro moving—for instance, we had one last year—we respond quicker than you do to a fire.”

  In tony Grosse Pointe, which shares Mack Avenue with Detroit, Realtors had developed a “point system,” which took into account religion, ethnicity, skin color, accent, and “Americanization.” The system excluded most Poles and Italians, even more Jews, and all blacks.

  Not all whites could afford a house in the suburbs, but most could afford a gun. Shotgun sales tripled after the riot. So did membership in the Breakthrough, a paramilitary Caucasian defense league formed to prevent another “Communist-inspired” black riot. Breakthrough’s founder, a parks and recreation department employee, wanted “to arm the whites” of Detroit, because if blacks took over, it would mean “guerilla war in the suburbs.”

  Detroit also had a deeper tradition of black militance than most cities. It was the birthplace of the Nation of Islam, founded by a carpet salesman of unknown racial origin who called himself W. D. Fard. Fard preached that Caucasians had been bred by an evil black scientist named Yacub, as a “race of devils” who would rule the Earth for six thousand years. Fard’s Christian analogue was the black separatist preacher Reverend Albert B. Cleage, founder of the Shrine of the Black Madonna. Cleage began denouncing nonviolent, integrationist black leaders as “Uncle Toms” in the early 1960s, even before Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. After the riot, he advised his followers to stockpile a month’s supply of food to prepare for an attack by suburbanites bent on racial revenge.

  Before the riot, Cavanagh and Romney had been considered potential presidents. Neither ever won another election. Romney left the governorship in 1969 to become secretary of housing and urban development. He tried to sell President Nixon on integration policies that might prevent more urban riots, but his arguments were thwarted by the white backlash created by his own riot. That same year, a broken Cavanagh announced he would not seek a third term. He died ten years later, aged fifty-one.

  Politically, the chief beneficiary of the Detroit riot was Coleman A. Young Jr., the state senator from Black Bottom. Detroit elected one last Caucasian mayor, to succeed Cavanagh, but by 1973, it was a black-majority city. Young won the mayor’s race that year and set about ensuring Detroit would remain a black-majority city. The city’s first black mayor began his twenty-year rule with an inaugural speech that many whites still quote: “To all dope pushers, to all rip-off arti
sts, to all muggers. It’s time to leave Detroit. Hit 8 Mile Road. I don’t give a damn if they’re black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.”

  8 Mile Road is the northern limit of Detroit but also a symbolic border between black and white. Suburbanites would have imported the Berlin Wall there if they could have, and they heard in Young’s speech an incitement to export criminals into their communities.

  Unlike most black leaders of his generation, Coleman Young’s politics had not been formed by the civil rights movement. He was a radical union organizer who had been purged from the Congress of Industrial Organizations during Walter Reuther’s Communist witch hunt in the late 1940s. Blackballed by the UAW and the Ford personnel department, Young reemerged as a leader of the National Negro Labor Council. Called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Young won his first citywide street cred when he challenged a Southern congressman’s pronunciation of “Negro” as “niggra.” “That word,” Young said, correcting the segregationist, “is Negro.” Young’s campaign issue was police brutality. His opponent was white police chief John Nichols. The defeat convinced Nichols to follow his constituency to the suburban Oakland County, where he eventually was elected sheriff.

  Black Detroiters refer to the riot as “the rebellion” and to Young’s election as “the liberation,” a shattering of white oppression. Young remained in power by perpetuating the racial estrangement that had made him mayor. He set himself up as Detroit’s standard of blackness, labeling his political and journalistic opponents racists and Uncle Toms, and declaring that Detroiters would never disarm as long as whites were “practicing Ku Klux Klan out in the woods.” The mayor knew he had gained control of the city for the same reason blacks got anything in America—because the whites had discarded it and moved on—and he made sure his constituents understood that a vote against Young was a vote for the suburbanites who had left this mess behind. Young was accused of creating a Midwestern Zaire, a revolutionary autocracy where the Big Man’s photograph stared from the wall of every public building. After author Ze’ev Chafets visited to research his book Devil’s Night and Other True Tales of Detroit, he declared Detroit “America’s first Third World City … seething with post-colonial resentments.”