Black Detroit
Page 25
There’s a scene in Nubia Kai’s play Parting that captures the attitude of young black men in the late eighties reflecting on what their parents had to do to make a living, especially when employed at the Ford Motor Company. Sudan, one of Kai’s main characters, laments to Sherrie, his girlfriend, that his father
. . . didn’t mind workin’. Nigger worked his ass off and acted like he loved it. Thought he was the John Henry of Ford Mo. Company. He be braggin’ about how they use to come out to the factory the night before it opened and stand in line. . . . He did that every night for five months till he got re-hired in ’36 and brag about it! See, workin’ for Mr. Ford was a prestigious thing back then, but it ain’t about shit to me ’cept slavery. I guess I didn’t inherit that John Henry mentality from him. I say crush the muthafuckin’ railroads and the monsters who own it.18
Kai dramatized what James Boggs had been preaching for years about the rapid deindustrialization, outsourcing, and the closing of factories that for generations were a reliable source of income. “There are no industries coming to our cities to employ them now that capitalism has reached the multinational stage,” Boggs explained.19 From his perspective, even if Sudan had wanted a job at Ford like his father, his chances in the late eighties were slim to none. Boggs recognized what thousands of young black Detroiters would soon discover—that the traditional jobs once waiting for them when they came of age were no longer available. This was a transitional phase of the auto industry. Plant after plant was shutting down; between 1987 and 1990 only one new plant opened in the country, a General Motors Saturn factory, a multibillion-dollar project designed to win back buyers of Japanese automobiles.20 A new day had arrived, and it didn’t include the young black hopefuls from the high schools of Detroit.
Sudan would have been a perfect role for actor/director Earl D. A. Smith, but by the time Kai had finished her play, Smith had joined the ancestors. Death cut short his promising career, which had begun in the early seventies with leading roles in Rashomon (1973) and Devour the Snow (1979) at the Marygrove Theater. His leadership role in the founding of the Black Theater Department at Wayne State University was well established by the time he was featured in the film Freedom Road (1979) or in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the college’s Hilberry Theater. “He was a fantastic actor and very effective teacher,” recalled Peggy Coley, one of his students. “I can still remember his directing me. Earl was a taskmaster and he was absolutely devoted to the development of Black Theater at Wayne State. It’s too bad he died so soon.”21
Although Smith was not a member of the Concept East Theater, founded in 1960 by Woodie King Jr., along with David Rambeau, Cliff Frazier, and others, his intention was to instill that same independence and creativity within the academies where he taught and performed. The mantle he and Concept East left behind was adopted in 1985 by Council Cargle and his wife, Maggie Porter, when they founded Harmonie Park Playhouse in the basement of the Madison-Lenox Hotel. Cargle was a versatile and busy actor who earned his bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University and when not on the stage could be found at Michigan’s Thirty-Sixth District Court, where he was a deputy clerk for District Judge Denise Page Hood. After the judge took a position at the city’s Recorder’s Court in 1989, Cargle retired and devoted his time to the theater, not only his own but practically everyone in the city, including the Detroit Repertory Theater, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre Company, the Attic, the Unstabled, and Plowshares Theater Company. After a performance or on weekends, he was part of the audience at the 101 Lounge, where he joined pianist and vocalist Kris Lynn waiting his turn to sing.
Detroit’s lawyers were jubilant to learn that Judge Hood had been chosen to serve on Recorder’s Court. That joy was stifled, however, when attorney Ken Cockrel died on April 25, 1989. Cockrel, fifty, died of a heart attack days before he planned to announce his mayoral bid. According to his wife, Sheila Murphy, he had completed the petition process for his candidacy.
Few possessed Cockrel’s mastery of the language, “fine voluble colloquy” as one friend observed of his rapid-fire delivery with a complement of words that often flew over the heads of his listeners. “Not sure what he said, but it sure sounded good,” was the reaction of many in earshot of his eloquence. Noted sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, who grew up in Detroit, said he was directly influenced by Cockrel’s linguistic agility. “He talked so much, he was called TV,” recalled his brother, Jesse Cockrel.22 On April 29, his charisma and extraordinary odyssey were recalled at a memorial service at the Rackham Auditorium. Local activist and cultural leader John Sinclair was among those in attendance; he lamented that Cockrel was “cut down from within at perhaps the height of his considerable powers as a champion of the people and spokesman for human and economic rights.”23 The tributes for him came from a disparate coterie of friends and associates, including Justin Ravitz, Mike Hamlin, Mayor Young, Governor John Blanchard, and Michigan Supreme Court justice Dennis Archer. Cockrel, Hamlin mused, was driven by intent—great conviction and commitment—and that drive may have been “responsible for his death.”24 His wife often heard friends and associates say, “We feel cheated. He should have become our mayor.”25
A year later, in the summer of 1990, Nelson Mandela toured the United States after spending twenty-seven years in prison. One of the sites he visited was Tiger Stadium. It’s doubtful that Cockrel would have been invited to share the rostrum at Tiger Stadium with the South African leader, since Mayor Young was calling the shots. To have Cockrel at the event would have riled a few of the other dignitaries, possibly even Judge Damon Keith, whom Young chose to deliver the opening remarks. On the morning of the event, Keith noticed that Rosa Parks had not been invited, which to him was a grievous oversight. Keith quickly contacted Parks’s aide, Elaine Steele, and said that he would pick her up. When Mandela and his wife, Winnie, emerged from the plane, one of the first people they recognized was Rosa Parks. “Nelson Mandela stated that Parks had been his inspiration during the long years he was jailed on Robben Island and that her story had inspired South African freedom fighters.”26
The meeting between Parks and Mandela brought the civil and human rights struggles to an exciting pinnacle. Parks appeared overwhelmed by the moment, as exhilarated as she had recently been in Washington, DC, for her seventy-seventh birthday celebration at the Kennedy Center.27 Detroiters will never forget the two days Mandela spent staying at the Westin Hotel in Renaissance Center, walking along Atwater Street, traversing Hart Plaza, and visiting Ford’s Dearborn Assembly Plant. “I am your flesh and blood,” he told the awed workers. “I am your comrade.” Black nationalist activist the Rev. Milton Henry, formerly of the Republic of New Afrika, was part of the welcoming committee and regaled Mandela with an excerpt of biblical scripture.
That evening fifty thousand people jammed Tiger Stadium to see Mandela and to hear Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, and local blues diva Ortheia Barnes serenade the great leader. After shouts of “Amandla!” which means “freedom” in Xhosa or Zulu, Mandela told the crowd, “Right now I wish I could climb down the stage and join you in the stands and embrace you one and all.” He stunned Detroiters when he told them that the songs of Motown had helped him survive the prisons of South Africa. “Brother, brother, there’s far too many of you dying,” he sang, mimicking Marvin Gaye, much to the amazement of the crowd.28
Parks had also been deeply committed to Detroit’s survival. She was particularly devoted to the Michigan Chronicle, a treasured institution. Near the end of the decade, the Chronicle, celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, was still recovering from the loss of two stalwarts—the publisher and editor in chief, Longworth Quinn, and a highly respected columnist, Albert Dunmore, who at one time was the paper’s managing editor. Quinn, who arrived at the paper in 1944 as the business manager, moved steadily upward until he was the helmsman, proving that he had the leadership skills to keep the paper afloat. “His unique contribution to the birth and growth of our annual Fight for Freedom Fund Din
ner was published in the Chronicle week after week in every name of each dinner subscriber,” remembered Arthur Johnson, then executive secretary of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. “He also handled special publicity for the dinner from the beginning up to his death.”29
Like his colleague Quinn, Dunmore was a graduate of Hampton Institute, as well as a journalist and civil rights activist fully aware of the paper’s importance as an alternative to mainstream media. He had spent twenty years at the Pittsburgh Courier before reuniting with Quinn at the Chronicle in 1961. In 1968, Dunmore was hired by Chrysler as a specialist in urban affairs. But the ink in his blood brought him back to the Chronicle in 1988, where until his death he worked as a consultant.
24
A MAYOR AND MALICE
By 1990, Detroit’s population was just over a million and predominantly black. Since the end of World War II, nearly a million and a half whites had left the city. The suburbs, Mayor Young lamented, “. . . had surpassed Detroit not only in population but in wealth, in commerce—even in basketball, for God’s sake.”1 He was saddened, too, to learn that on January 5, Judge Longworth Quinn Jr. had apparently put a pistol to his head the night before and was found dead in a bedroom at his mother’s house. Judge Quinn, forty-six, left a suicide note, but it was not disclosed by the police. Even the headline story in the Michigan Chronicle, where his late father had been editor for many years, could provide only a modicum of information about the tragedy. It was probably Danton Wilson, the executive editor, who penned the editorial that recounted Quinn’s varied career as an activist, teacher, lawyer, and chief judge of Detroit’s Thirty-Sixth District Court without any mention of possible despondency over the death of his fiancée, who leaped from the twenty-third floor of their apartment in Trolley Palace in 1984. “Those closest to him,” the editorial stated, “say his most important legacy was as a humanitarian. He was a superior judge, handling with mental dexterity lofty judicial concepts and legal ideas. His writing on even the most complicated and technical and legal matter was lucid.”2
Quinn’s gifts could be thought of in musical terms. As the jazz musician Dox, portrayed by Von Washington in Bill Harris’s play Coda that opened in the spring of 1990 at the Attic Theater relates, “I think everybody, like, gets a gift.” He’s explaining to Theresa, his daughter, an aspiring musician, the unique sound that differentiates one musician from all others.
Everybody don’t realize it, or get the chance to develop it. But some—lucky ones do.
Now, don’t ask me how it’s decided, and it’s sad when they don’t, but it’s even sadder when that gift is just pushed aside, out of anger, or ignorance, or fear or—Anyway, like I was trying to tell you before, for a musician, your sound is the only thing that’s yours.
That very first sound you make is how they know you’re alive, and they say “Yeah, baby, welcome to the world.” And when it’s all over, they bury you, by yourself, no lover, no money truck, no dope man, just you; barefoot, and with a split up the back to your dress.
But what lives is the story you told. And the way you told it. And the sound you told it with. That’s it.3
One of the performers in the play was Thomas “Beans” Bowles, who certainly possessed a unique sound on the baritone saxophone and flute. He was popularly known as Dr. Beans Bowles and few Detroit musicians bridged the worlds of jazz and Motown as well as he did. That bridge began in Arkansas, extended to Indiana, to Saint Louis, and on to the navy before Bowles found his home in Detroit. He was a mainstay on baritone saxophone in bands led by Lionel Hampton, Bill Doggett, and Illinois Jacquet, but most visibly with Maurice King and his band at the Flame Show Bar, where the Gordy family, including Berry, was holding forth. King’s résumé was also impressive; he had replaced the venerable Jesse Stone as the leader of the Sweethearts of Rhythm, the first integrated all-women’s jazz band. As he was with the King ensemble, Bowles was Gordy’s aide-de-camp and soon an all-purpose member of the company—playing in the band and coordinating with the Motor Town Revue, and his flute solo is featured on “Fingertips,” a hit tune recorded by Stevie Wonder in 1963. There was even a stint as musical director for comedienne Joan Rivers. Bowles finally got his own ensemble and a venue of the same name when he became musical director for the Graystone Jazz Orchestra. By July 1991, the Graystone International Jazz Museum, no longer at its original location on Woodward (it was demolished in 1980) but on Broadway in downtown Detroit, was guided by James Jenkins, who founded the museum in 1974. After Jenkins died, Bowles was forced to function in a dual capacity to keep the museum afloat, which was largely supported by funds from white donors.4
White patronage of jazz was nothing new, and for the Graystone it went back to the 1920s, when Jean Goldkette and his orchestra commanded the house. Back then, many black musicians called it the Stone Gray for its policy of permitting blacks to attend on Monday nights only. Cover charges were also readily paid by white patrons of Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, the city’s oldest continuously active jazz club. Their money supported white-owned establishments but seldom black-owned businesses and merchants such as Ed Vaughn, a state representative and entrepreneur, whose bookstore was destroyed by the police during the 1967 rebellion. They claimed they raided the store because of reports that weapons were there. Thirty years later, in 1990, Vaughn showed the same ambition for private enterprise but this time on a larger scale. Yourland Mall was Vaughn’s response to the malls surrounding Detroit that were siphoning off black dollars. “It’s all part of what I call the 90-percent solution to economic freedom, which is to get Black folk to spend 90 percent of their consumer dollars in the Black community,” he told a reporter. “We’re trying to instill this idea in the African American community so that our dollars turn over in our community at least once before leaving it.”5
In the 1990s, black businesses in Detroit, as Vaughn inferred, were troubled and in decline. The institutions they depended on to feed them a steady supply of personnel and potential entrepreneurs, such as Lewis Business College, was clogged and struggling with its own set of peculiar challenges. Founded in 1928 by Violet T. Lewis in Indiana, by 1941 Lewis was incorporated in Michigan, becoming the first historically black college in the state. It was during the tenure of Dr. Marjorie Harris as president that the college began its pursuit of junior college status. In 1975, under the name Lewis College of Business, it received accreditation from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA). That status was reaffirmed in 1990, though like much of the city, the school was feeling the onslaught of a budget crisis that hampered enrollment and dreams of expanding the curriculum and staff.6 There were rumors that the school would soon be relocating to the far west side of the city.
Even the Bing Group, a steel processing and distribution company founded by basketball legend Dave Bing, experienced a dip in profits in 1990 when it posted sales of $61 million, down 17.44 percent from 1989. Meanwhile the profits at Bing’s other company, Superb Manufacturing, increased by 40.49 percent, roughly an $8 million increase from $20 million the year before. “It was a bad year for profits,” an automotive analyst concluded,7 though one of Bing’s companies appeared to do well. In any case, it may not have been a banner year for Bing on the business steel front, but he picked up many commendations and honors. During the NBA All-Star Game in 1990, he was given the Schick Achievement Award for his work after his outstanding basketball career. He was also inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame that same year.
Noted Detroit painter Bennie White Ethiopia, his locks long and gray, stood admiring his depiction of Malice Green on a wall. In contrast to Ethiopia’s hair, Green’s was coifed in an Afro that surrounded his young, handsome face like a black halo. This was Ethiopia’s tribute to the fallen Green, thirty-four, who had been killed at this spot by two white policemen on November 5, 1992, outside a suspected crack house on West Warren Street. When Green’s car stopped in front of the alleged crack house, the officers, Larry Nevers and Walter Budz
yn, ordered him to get out of the vehicle. When Green refused, they radioed for backup, and meanwhile removed him from the car by force. They noticed that Green kept one of his fists clenched, and they ordered him to open it. Again he refused, and they began banging his fist with their heavy metal flashlights. “While the policemen were beating Green, five additional officers arrived in response to the backup call,” according to an account by the police. “By then, it was later alleged, Nevers and Budzyn were hitting Green on the head with their flashlights. One of the five, a white officer named Robert Lessnau, was alleged to have joined in the beating. Sergeant Freddie Douglas, who was black and the ranking officer at the scene, allegedly did not participate in the beating, but neither did he intervene to stop it.”8
Malice Green died that night, and the anger in the community spread faster than the details of his death. Unlike the outrage that had followed the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles a few months before, no riot occurred in Detroit. Community activists and civic leaders, alarmed by the tragedy, demanded that the officers involved be immediately suspended. Within two weeks, Wayne County prosecutor John D. O’Hair handed down second-degree murder charges on Nevers and Budzyn. Sergeant Douglas was charged with involuntary manslaughter and willful neglect of duty for failing to halt the beating. This charge was later dismissed by another judge on the grounds that the beating was already under way when Douglas arrived. Officer Lessnau was charged with aggravated assault. They all pled not guilty.
For more than three months in the summer of 1993, the trial raged before Judge George Crockett III, whose father was the legendary legal genius. The fact that the trial was aired via Court TV may have helped to reduce the possibility of a riot. Two separate juries were impaneled. The Nevers jury was composed of ten blacks and two whites; Budzyn’s had eleven blacks and one white. Officer Lessnau had a bench trial before Judge Crockett. The community watched with interest, their eyes glued on Kym Worthy, whose track record as a prosecutor was remarkable. She was flamboyant and never shy when it came to dramatics. Nevers told the court that he feared for his life during the altercation and confessed that he had hit Green several times with his flashlight. Budzyn denied ever striking Green and said he had not seen anyone else hit him. “That testimony [prompted] one of the highlights of Prosecutor Worthy’s presentation. She pulled a tape measure from her pocket and stretched it out two feet. ‘You were this far away from Malice Green and didn’t see him being pummeled to death?’ she demanded. ‘You couldn’t smell the blood?’”9 Another gripping moment occurred when Scott Walsh, an emergency medical technician who had tried to help the injured Green, took the stand. He testified, “There was so much blood on his head that our bandages just slid right off.”10