6: From Battles on City Streets to Clashes in the Courtroom

The principle of Reparation is recognized in international law.... [W]e must consider recognizing reparations now as a domestic principle.1

While Detroit’s residents and its auto plant workers were buzzing about the murders committed by James Johnson Jr., the accused sat in the Wayne County jail awaiting his trial for first-degree murder. Although Johnson was but one of many autoworkers who recently had exploded violently on Detroit’s shop floors, his shooting spree attracted national media attention because it so dramatically symbolized the chaos that still enveloped America’s urban centers and plants, even after civic leaders had extinguished the fires of urban rebellion and labor leaders had redoubled their efforts to improve the quality of work life for their most unskilled laborers. Johnson’s deed also clearly illuminated the fact that powerful forces to both the left and to the right of liberalism had emerged in Detroit since 1967 and did not appear to be going away. Although Johnson was completely apolitical, his murder trial would become one of the most politically charged events in Detroit’s history, as radicals, liberals, and conservatives sought to have their views of “justice” prevail.

Johnson’s murder trial followed closely on the heels of several other equally controversial trials and was followed by still others. In fact, between 1969 and 1973, both the civil and criminal courts of Detroit became a new battleground on which radicals, conservatives, and liberals waged their war for control of the city.

In every one of these highly charged court battles, Detroit’s black and white revolutionaries hoped to use the legal system not only to acquit black defendants, but also to prove conclusively just how discriminatory and unjust the city of Detroit still was. Simultaneously, the city’s white conservatives, who had long suspected that liberals had become too soft on crime and violence, still hoped that the court system might harshly penalize defendants such as Johnson. And for Detroit’s liberals, who had come to feel that their ability to govern the city depended on defeating the challenges emanating from both the Left and the Right, these trials were a pivotal opportunity to show, once and for all, that they were the city’s most fair-minded arbiters of justice.

To prove this, Detroit’s liberals—be they judges, hearing referees, politicians, or administrators—chose not to stand in the way of the black radical lawyers like League leader Kenneth Cockrel, who repeatedly tried to push the city’s legal system to its most progressive limits. Indeed, they decided to celebrate, and take credit for, the victories that such attorneys managed to secure for their clients. And this decision proved pivotal for Detroit politics, as, much to the Left’s dismay, it netted these liberals new legitimacy among the city’s previously disenchanted poor and working-class blacks.

* * * *

The first controversial and pivotal trial to hit Detroit’s criminal courts stemmed from the night of March 27, 1969, when two police officers were killed during their raid on the New Bethel Church. While initially the Detroit Police Department (DPD) had rounded up 142 African Americans and brought them to the city jail, ultimately prosecutors decided to charge four black men—Alfred Hibbitt, Kirkwood Hall, Raphael Viera, and Clarence Fuller—with either assault with intent to kill and murder or murder in the first degree.2 These men would not all be tried together. One trial date was set for Hibbitt and Kirkwood, and their case came to be known as New Bethel One. Another date was reserved for the trial of Vera and Fuller, known as New Bethel Two.

As soon as the police arrested this foursome and bound them over for their respective trials, a young black attorney from the League offered these defendants his services. This man, Kenneth Cockrel, was “at 34, the most talked about lawyer in Detroit.”3 As a member of the League’s executive board and an unapologetic Marxist, Cockrel certainly stood out. But he also was well known and respected as an attorney who consistently defended poor Detroiters, regardless of their notoriety. Still, it was Cockrel’s political ideology, as well as his radical litigation style, that virtually guaranteed that New Bethel One and Two would become highly public and controversial events.

Cockrel made headlines even before New Bethel One began. Once the police charged his clients, Cockrel’s first order of business was to get a lower bail for them so that they might be released pending their trials. On April 19, 1969, Cockrel came before Recorder’s Court Judge Joseph E. Maher to argue for thirty-eight-year-old factory worker Al Hibbitt’s release. During these proceedings, the prosecution maintained that Hibbitt’s bail should be extremely high because he had attacked a member of law enforcement. But Cockrel argued that his client was not the man that police were looking for, and that bail therefore should be reasonable. After hearing both sides, Judge Maher sided with the prosecution and set bail at $50,000. Cockrel was outraged. He stormed out of the courtroom, where reporters then overheard him criticize Maher for doubling Hibbitt’s original bail, which Cockrel already thought was “confiscatory.” Ears perked up as Cockrel went on to call Maher “a racist monkey, a honkie dog, a racist pirate and a bandit” under his breath.4 As soon as Cockrel left the courthouse, the reporters who had heard his inflammatory comments went to the judge to ask his opinion of the outburst. Infuriated, Maher promptly charged Cockrel with contempt of court and ordered the attorney to present himself to Judge Joseph A. Sullivan for a hearing.5

But upon learning of the contempt charge against him, Cockrel immediately went on the offensive. With the city’s many black and white revolutionaries offering their support, and with liberal organizations such as the Wolverine Bar Association and black liberal congressmen such as John Conyers Jr. standing by his right to free speech, Cockrel decided that he actually welcomed the chance to defend his charges against Maher in open court. It particularly gratified Cockrel that city residents and autoworkers alike were flocking to his aid. As DRUM members announced, “at 2:00 p.m. Monday every black worker who is on the afternoon shift should make it their duty to be at Recorders Court in support of Brother Ken Cockrel. Time and time again it has been Ken alone in our behalf.”6

Setting out “to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Judge Joseph Maher is a criminal, a racist, a bandit and a thief,” Cockrel’s office immediately began calling on linguists, etymologists, and civil liberties experts to help draft a case.7 Even the well-known lawyer F. Lee Bailey was “one of the many who have volunteered and will testify.”8 Apparently, Bailey agreed with Cockrel’s view that the contempt “charges are designed to deter, intimidate and prevent prospective clients of defendant [Cockrel], or are reasonably calculated to have the effect of doing so, from engaging in litigation ... all in violation of the First, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.”9 The amount of rigorous research that went into the Cockrel contempt defense was staggering. Hundreds of pages of information on racism, civil rights, civil liberties, and the use of the English language flooded the law office where Cockrel’s law partner, Harry Philo, was drawing from such materials to draft a “Memorandum of Authorities in Support of Motion to Dismiss” the contempt charges.

When the contempt proceedings began, the courtroom was packed and nearby Kennedy Square was filled to capacity with pro-Cockrel demonstrators. After two days of hearings, prosecutor Michael O’Hara bowed to public and media pressure and quietly suggested a voluntary dismissal of all charges to Cockrel’s defense team.10 In turn Judge Sullivan dutifully dismissed the contempt case and the New Bethel Trials proceeded. Significantly, however, the Motor City Left had already capitalized on the educational potential of that contempt charge. Harry Philo’s planned defense of Cockrel was printed and distributed around the city, thus giving Detroit’s radicals much publicity and making it clear that they were committed to exposing the injustice of “the system.” Almost overnight, Detroiters learned that “Ken Cockrel is one of the most sought-after speakers and commentators on our society in the State of Michigan at colleges, law schools, churches, high schools, political organizations, youth groups—a featured speaker for the Michigan ACLU—a frequently cited candidate for Mayor of Detroit—a leader of many organizations on the side of the people.”11 Thus, as a result of Maher’s attempt to censure Cockrel, and the defense that Cockrel mounted, Detroiters came to know more about this young attorney and his ideas than they otherwise might have.

Kenneth V. Cockrel, March 1970. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

As New Bethel One and Two played out, Cockrel and the inner-city Left received only greater attention. When, for example, the initial group of prospective jurors in New Bethel One came from a predominately white pool, Detroiters watched in amazement as Cockrel pushed his allowable challenges during jury selection to the limit in order to get a sympathetic panel. By probing so deeply into the racial perspectives of the prospective jurors, Cockrel successfully seated a jury far closer to being the “peers” of his defendants than was usually the case. Indeed, jury composition mattered a great deal to Cockrel. He had decided early on that the best way to defend each of those accused in the New Bethel murders was to remind members of the jury that these were black men being charged with attacking white police officers—officers, he maintained, who had a well-known reputation as being violent, untrustworthy, and racist every time they stepped foot into the black community.

As the Cockrel defense team saw it, “the full scope of police-community relations in Detroit has been and is fraught with racial polarity and tension and New Bethel fits into this entire framework.”12 Cockrel insisted that every New Bethel defendant be judged within this particular social context—a context in which black men always were assumed to be guilty when in fact, he argued, it was white officers who kept breaking the law. Perhaps because they related well to the picture that Cockrel painted, or perhaps because they simply were not persuaded by the prosecution’s case (indeed, one black officer on the stand admitted that he couldn’t “swear to the fact that this was the individual I seen in front of the church doing the shooting”),13 the jury of six blacks and six whites in New Bethel One ultimately voted for acquittal. In doing so, they sent shock waves through the radical and conservative communities of the Motor City alike.

But before anyone could digest the implications of the verdict in New Bethel One, other dramas were unfolding in the New Bethel Two trial that also had begun in 1969. From the beginning, New Bethel Two was more newsworthy than New Bethel One because both defendants were self-proclaimed black nationalist separatists who had gone public with their radical views in publications such as the Inner City Voice and Black Consciousness. Indeed, the Republic of New Africa that had been meeting at the New Bethel Church on the fateful night often proclaimed its desire to turn five Southern states into a country for blacks and defendant Clarence Fuller was an admitted RNA member known as “Brother Chakka.” Defendant Raphael Viera not only admitted to being an RNA delegate from New York, but he also proudly proclaimed his membership in the Young Lords party of Puerto Rican revolutionaries.14 Given their clients’ political views and that they had not managed to obtain a jury as representative of their clients as they had in New Bethel One, Cockrel and fellow defense attorneys Milton Henry and Sheldon Halpern were concerned about the case.

Clarence Fuller, April 15, 1969. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

From the moment that the New Bethel Two trial got under way, the defense team was disturbed to note that prosecutors Robert Harrison and Owen Galligan produced a nineteen-year-old witness, David Brown Jr., who testified that Viera and Fuller indeed had shot at the New Bethel victims, officers Michael Czapski and Richard Worobec. Although the defense pointed out that Brown’s father had received a healthy fee for persuading his son to testify on behalf of the prosecution, this testimony was nevertheless damaging to the accused. Undeterred however, Cockrel was determined to use Brown’s testimony to his clients’ advantage, and he did so by directing the jury’s attention to what he argued was the police-induced chaos and violence of the New Bethel incident. On cross-examination, Cockrel asked Brown to tell the jury what his experiences had been on the night of March 27, 1969, which, the jury found out, included being repeatly kicked in the head by the officers in the church.15 By getting Brown to detail his injuries and his subsequent repeated trips to the doctor, the Cockrel-led defense team successfully focused the jury’s attention on the grievous actions of the police.

Despite employing a “police brutality” defense strategy similar to that used in New Bethel One, Cockrel was not altogether sure that the New Bethel Two jury was going to be very sympathetic, as he had not succeeded in getting a large black presence on it. Midway through the trial, Cockrel decided to get to the bottom of why, with almost 50 percent of Detroit’s population being black, there were so few blacks on Recorder’s Court jury panels such as this one. Cockrel, along with his radical white partner, Justin Ravitz, went to the jury commissioner’s office and demanded to see the questionnaires that were used to compose the panels of prospective jurors. What they found chilled them and would change the course of legal history in the Motor City.

As soon as Cockrel and Ravitz began looking carefully at the jury pool questionnaires, they discovered that often the forms were headed with handwritten buzz phrases such as “on ADC,” “long hair,” or “community activist.”16 Cockrel and Ravitz further discovered that nonurban white residents made it into the pool of prospective jurors far more often than did inner-city residents, and that recent migrants from the South, usually black, were dismissed from potential service disproportionately.17 Because the Jury Commission was still using the 1967, not the 1968 or 1969, voter rolls, Cockrel and Ravitz were also enlightened as to why so few young people—their clients’ peers—had made it on to the New Bethel Two jury.

Armed with their findings, the Cockrel defense team filed a “Joint Motion to Quash Jury Panel and for Other Relief and Affidavit Thereon” before Judge Horace Gilmore, the New Bethel Two trial judge.18 They alleged in their motion that “the Jury Commissioners’ determination of jurors’ qualifications did not meet constitutional standards of fairness, objectivity or freedom from discrimination racial and otherwise.”19 Judge Gilmore suspended New Bethel Two until a full investigation into potential Jury Commission improprieties could take place.

The New Bethel Two trial was on hold for a month as Judge Gilmore heard testimony from the Jury Commission itself. After Cockrel’s team subpoenaed Jury Commissioner Karl McKeehan to testify, and Ravitz grilled him for over four hours, according to the Detroit Free Press, it was “confirmed that many persons were excluded from service for such reasons as having a beard, wearing miniskirts, being on welfare, or chewing gum.”20 Specifically Cockrel and Ravitz proved “824 total cases of exclusion which were ‘consistent with our contention’ that the process is ‘illegal, unconstitutional and racist.’”21 As a result of the testimony in this Jury Commission hearing, Judge Gilmore called for a thorough investigation by the Wayne County Prosecutor, a special investigator, or by the Wayne County Circuit Court.22 Then, rather than seek a mistrial in New Bethel Two, Cockrel and Ravitz requested that Gilmore recall and seat wrongly excused jurors in that case. After the judge agreed to this, Cockrel and Ravitz were able to merge a new group of previously excused jurors with members of the original jury and “for the first time ever in Detroit ... a majority Black jury” sat in the box at Recorders Court.23

Not surprisingly, while the Cockrel defense team’s victory in the jury-selection process heartened city blacks, it angered white conservatives around the city. As Cockrel and Ravitz had hoped, when the New Bethel Two trial resumed, after deliberating twenty-eight hours the new jury of twelve black and two white Detroiters acquitted both Viera and Fuller. And, of course, this was exactly the outcome that conservative whites most feared.24 As they well knew, the implications of this challenge to the jury selection process, and this verdict, went far beyond the New Bethel trial itself.

Indeed shortly after the New Bethel Two defense team filed its motion before Judge Gilmore, the Presiding Judge of the Recorder’s Court, Robert E. DeMascio, felt compelled to issue an order overhauling the way that all Recorder’s Court juries were chosen from then on. The order significantly curtailed the discretion of the Jury Commission to arbitrarily exclude people from jury service on discrminiatory or capricious grounds. Henceforth, the Jury Commissioners could excuse individulas from prospective jury service only for the specified reasons and grounds enumerated in the law. Any interview that might lead to excusal from jury service for discretionary reasons had to be held in open court before a court reporter, and the names of all individuals who had theretofore been excused on discretionary grounds had to be accumulated and relisted as persons to be called for jury service.25

Because of the dramatic outcomes in the New Bethel One and Two, and particularly because now every poor black defendent awaiting trial would have much better odds of being judged by a jury of his or her peers, when the James Johnson Jr. murder trial finally hit the court docket, Detroiters from across the political, class, and color spectrum watch with bated breath.

With Cockrel and Ravitz agreeing to defend Johnson, every citizen knew that this would be a particularly important proceeding. Feeling a new sense of optimism after their victories in the New Bethel trials, radicals hoped that in the Johnson trial Cockrel could once again achieve a real triumph for the city’s African Americans. Simultaneously, conservative whites hoped that the New Bethel trials had been a fluke and that the Johnson judge would harshly penalize this criminal. City liberals of both races hoped that the Johnson trial would vindicate the rationality and fairness of the legislative system, just as they believed that the New Bethel trials had.

Voicing the sentiment of much of Detroit’s liberal leadership after the New Bethel trials, Director of the Commission on Community Relations (CCR), Richard Marks had argued that “black citizens genuinely mourn the death of a police officer ... and genuinely support the apprehension of the killer ... [but] they are simply unwilling to abandon for any reason, the traditional struggle by which any citizen would advance to protect and assert his common humanity.”26 “Negro citizens,” Marks continued, “are as desperately concerned that there will be proper policing in their communities as any other citizen in our city.”27 To liberal leaders, the fact that black and white Detroiters were resolving their differences in courtrooms instead of on city streets was testimony to the strength and very successes of liberalism. They intended to drive this point home. If blacks accused of serious crimes in Detroit could now receive a fair trial before a jury of their peers, then their liberal agenda had indeed made in-roads into entrenched racial discrimination. The New Bethel trials were not about criminals winning out over cops; rather, they were glowing examples of how any violation of black civil rights—even by members of law enforcement—would effectively be censured in the judicial process.

But when Cockrel and Ravitz took on the Johnson defense, they had no intention of having this trial bolster the credibility of Detroit’s liberals. They approached Johnson’s defense by insisting that his actions be viewed and judged within the broader, and quite ugly, social context of the city and country in which he lived. While they agreed that Johnson, the individual, was on trial, they also insisted that he did not live or act in a vacuum, and that therefore his surrounding environment would be as relevant as his personal history in deciding this case. Not only did Cockrel and Ravitz decide to use a strategy similar to that in the New Bethel trials, but they also capitalized on their legal victory regarding jury selection. Johnson’s fourteen jurors were similar to him in terms of class and race. Several were migrants from the South; nine were black (five women and four men), and five were white (four women and one man).28 All of the men were hourly workers, and five of the women were wives of auto employees.29

Johnson’s trial began on April 30, 1971, in the courtroom of Judge Robert Colombo, with Prosecutor William Galligan laying out the facts as starkly as possible:30 Because Johnson had killed three people, he now should be convicted of first-degree murder.31 Cockrel, on the other hand, opened for the defense with a treatise on how Johnson, an ordinary black Detroiter, was driven to an emotional state in which murder was the tragic yet inevitable outcome. He went on to argue that the entire case, and thus the question of guilt or innocence, was far more complicated than the prosecution had suggested. While Cockrel readily conceded that Johnson had indeed pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Hinz, Jones, and Kowalski, and he agreed wholeheartedly that the act was vile and irrational, he also argued that there was an explanation for these brutal murders—one that would require the jury to look carefully at the life of the accused.32

Cockrel went on to summarize the most dramatic examples of the deprivation and resulting mental instability that characterized Johnson’s life. He touched on Johnson’s formative years in Starkville, where he and his siblings were raised under conditions “not so terribly different from the conditions of life of their forefathers and foremothers who were slaves.”33 He then made several bold and controversial statements, such as that even medical science could not adequately “assess the organic brain damage caused by a wholly inadequate diet.”34 He went on to briefly chronicle Johnson’s experiences in the army, his move to Detroit, and finally the events at Chrysler that precipitated his breakdown. In closing, Cockrel pointed out that, even if acquitted, Johnson would not go free—he would be committed to the Ionia State Hospital for the criminally insane.35

In arguing for a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity, Cockrel had a huge task ahead of him.36 Even for the best defense attorney, it would have been difficult to divert the jury’s attention from the chilling fact that three auto employees were dead as a result of Johnson’s actions. Cockrel had to persuade the jurors of three key things. First, he had to convince them that particular aspects of growing up on a sharecropping farm could scar a developing individual. Second, he needed to show that the debilitating mental effects of discrimination in the rural South also existed in the urban North, where Johnson moved as a young adult. Of course, to persuade the jury of either of these things, Cockrel also had to convince them that mental illness was almost entirely a social construct, that there was a direct relationship between racism and mental illness in African Americans like Johnson. Finally, Cockrel had to convince the jury that a series of key events that Johnson experienced while working at Chrysler stemmed directly from issues of race, thus exacerbating Johnson’s existing mental instability and driving him to the breaking point.

Cockrel and Ravitz called Johnson’s mother, Edna Hudson, as their first witness.37 It was her testimony that laid the foundation for a key component of the defense strategy: Johnson’s life story. Hudson was a petite woman who came into court wearing “an orange dress, white coat and grey patent leather pumps.”38 As the Michigan Chronicle put it bluntly, “her appearance and demeanor gave no advance notice of her testimony about the bleak, almost hopeless life of a Mississippi sharecropper.”39 The defense team was counting on just such testimony, as it wanted to take the jurors back to the moment Johnson was born and have them see exactly what his life had been like. Eventually, the jurors would hear every pertinent and recoverable detail of Johnson’s life. But it was Hudson’s testimony about her son’s earliest years in Starkville that most riveted the courtroom. As a journalist from the Michigan Chronicle later reported, “none of the studies of sociologists, psychologists, and congressional committees have illustrated the grinding poverty and hunger of the ‘other America’ as vividly as Mrs. Hudson did in that courtroom.”40

Cockrel then asked Hudson to explain how these conditions specifically affected James as a child. She replied that his health was “poor” as a child. She said that he was a very nervous child who had terrible “spells.” He would wake up at night crying and screaming. He would say that he was afraid of dying and that he kept seeing gruesome and distorted faces. She said that she would hold him close to her for about thirty minutes until these spells passed. She told the jury that she always worried terribly about her son. Intuitively, she knew it had been very bad that he had never been allowed to play as a child because there were never any toys, and the children always had to work like adults.

When Cockrel had finished questioning Hudson, the prosecution began an in-depth cross-examination attempting to show that Johnson’s problems as a child did not stem from deprivation but rather from the violent relationship between his mother and father, from the impact of his father subsequently leaving the family unit, and from the fact that Hudson left James alone so much when she went to work in Starkville. The prosecution also attempted to show that Johnson always had an abnormally violent temper even as a child. Hudson responded to this cross-examination by saying that she knew “of no attacks that he [James] made upon other persons with weapons or does not know of his ever having thrown things at persons.” In her opinion, her son “was like any ordinary child when he lost his temper.” She also pointed out that when she had to go off to work in town, she was only trying to provide her children with “something of their own.”

Next to Hudson, the second most powerful witness whom Cockrel and Ravitz called was Johnson himself. After he told the jury about growing up in Starkville, he was asked to describe the terrible hallucinations that he had suffered as a child. He said that these hallucinations would come at night and occasionally during the day. He heard voices beckoning him, and he would see distorted faces with eyes missing or eyes and mouths in the wrong place. He told the jury of his terror of people dying and of dying himself. He explained that whenever someone in the community died, it was his or her face that he would see in his nightmares. He testified that the more depressed he was, the worse his spells became.

Under cross-examination, the prosecutor attempted to show that Johnson was inventing the mental illness of his childhood and adulthood in order to get an acquittal. In prosecuting attorney Weisswasser’s opinion, for example, Johnson had “put on an act for the Army psychiatrist.”41 It soon became clear, however, that Johnson did not understand psychiatry and seemed to be completely unaware of the extent of his mental dysfunction. By the time he left the stand, it seemed unlikely that he had fabricated his tales of mental distress merely as a defense ploy. Indeed, even after the rigorous cross-examination of him and his mother, it was clear that Johnson had indeed been an emotionally disturbed child. The roots of his distress, however, were still not evident.

The prosecution continued to suggest that Johnson’s problems, if as severe as the defense suggested, were the product of an abusive home life. Thus, there could be no links between his breakdown at Chrysler years later and his life in the South as a child. But then the defense called Johnson’s first cousin, Maggie Taylor, to the stand. Taylor was born in Crawford, Mississippi, near Starkville. As a child, she had been very close to Johnson and had seen him every day. Her testimony corroborated that Johnson was an extremely troubled child, that death was one of his primary fears, and that this fear had remained with him to the present day. Taylor’s testimony was most important, however, because it introduced poignant evidence that Johnson’s mental instability had direct roots in the racial discrimination that he had endured and witnessed all of his life.

In fact Taylor’s testimony offered the jury the first concrete explanation of what had most precipitated Johnson’s awful fear of death, his terror of white people, and his chronic hallucinations. After conceding that Johnson had been fearful and had nightmares since the age of four or five, Taylor explained the terrible impact on Johnson of having seen the gruesome lynching of her brother Henry. In her words, “he was forever changed by it.”42 She told the jury that Henry had been accused of being in love with a white girl, and that a mob of whites chased him down and beat him until he was dead. According to Taylor, the nine-year-old Johnson had witnessed the entire event. She explained that he was so terrified by this violent act that he went into a “nervous rage.” Right after the murder, everyone in the family went to Johnson’s grandfather’s house across the street. Everyone was very distraught, she recalled, but Johnson was in a terrified stupor. While the other family members stayed at the grandfather’s house for five days and eventually came to terms with Henry’s death, Johnson could not eat or sleep and had awful visions. Taylor told the jury that from the moment of her brother’s lynching, Johnson’s fear of death, dying, and white people became more acute, as did his hallucinations, nervousness, and inability to function normally.

Cockrel and Ravitz hoped that the testimonies of Hudson, Johnson, and Taylor would convince the jury that there was a connection between childhood deprivation, the brutal effect of American racism, and Johnson’s mental illness. But they did not leave this to chance. The second key pillar of their defense strategy was the testimony of black psychologist Clemens H. Fitzgerald. They called Fitzgerald to the stand first and foremost to persuade the jury that Johnson was indeed mentally ill. Fitzgerald confirmed that Johnson exhibited “schizophrenic reaction, chronic undifferentiated, with marked paranoid features,”43 and that he was “an individual who has been chronically depressed and who probably as an adolescent, prior to service, was functioning as a schizoid personality.”44

But Cockrel also hoped that Fitzgerald’s testimony could persuade the jury that Johnson’s illness was directly rooted in poverty and discrimination. And Fitzgerald did chronicle the scarring effects of economic deprivation on the developing child, explaining that the effects of racism (such as witnessing a lynching or being called “boy” and “nigger” one’s whole life) seriously compromised the mental health of African Americans like Johnson. As Fitzgerald told the jury, “oppression and institutional racism had produced [in Johnson] the type of stress that is unknown to most.”45 He stated further that Johnson’s “schizoid personality”46 stemmed not just from “pathological family experiences” but also from the “results of racism with the feelings of being oppressed in an unwelcome society.”47 After Fitzgerald’s testimony, prosecutor Weisswasser remarked that he thought Fitzgerald “was making too large an issue ‘over a couple of hundred years of slavery.’”48

Cockrel and Ravitz also placed into evidence other psychological reports of Johnson, including the evaluations of psychologists, L. L. Mackenzie, Barbara Stewart and William Bowen. These official reports gave further evidence that Johnson was mentally ill because of the society in which he lived. Armed with these evaluations, Cockrel intended to prove that it was white people and white authority figures in particular whose behaviors exacerbated Johnson’s condition. As Stewart had reported, Johnson felt that it was not he alone who was unduly discriminated against by white people; so were many other blacks in America.49

Midway through the trial, the burden was still on Cockrel and Ravitz to show that Johnson’s specific background was directly connected to the murders. Perhaps it would have been enough to convince the jury that Johnson was insane in order to have him acquitted. The defense team, however, wanted to bring a certain logic to Johnson’s acts of 1970, and not just paint him as a schizophrenic ticking time bomb that could have exploded anywhere at any time. They wanted to show the jury that certain events in Johnson’s work life drove him to commit murder precisely because these events stemmed from the same social and racial discrimination that had made him mentally unstable in the first place.

This part of the defense strategy thoroughly outraged prosecutors, who could not believe that Cockrel and Ravitz were asking the jury to focus their attention on what it was like to be an autoworker, particularly a black autoworker, in Chrysler’s Eldon Avenue gear and axle plant. When prosecutors complained, however, Judge Colombo ruled that “all those factors are relevant under the law.”50 Cockrel and Ravitz then proceeded to call witness after witness who worked in the Eldon plant and who readily testified to the horrendous working conditions, shop-floor violence, and racial abuse that black workers endured there daily.51 Cockrel and Ravitz brought the stories of Gary Thompson and Maimie Williams to the jury’s attention in dramatic detail and elicited testimony about the numerous Eldon wildcats that had been sparked by shop-floor discrimination. The jury also heard testimony from Chief Union Steward Johnny Moffet that workers like Johnson feared for their lives in the plant because “the union was not adequately responsive to safety issues.” They heard from Johnson’s union steward, Clarence Horton, that there were “38 safety problems in department 78 alone.”52

Cockrel and Ravitz used all of this testimony to show that, although Johnson had attempted to escape southern racism and deprivation by moving to Detroit to “find a better job in the auto industry,”53 once at Chrysler he found as much discrimination and a similarly degrading work situation. When Johnson was on the stand, he had described how unsafe it was to work at Chrysler and how blacks always had to do the least safe and lowest-paid jobs. As he said, “the more dollars and cents you could demand the more there were racial overtones,” and, although he denied that “all white people tend to be racist” at Chrysler, he stated firmly that “all persons that he has seen subjected to harassment have been black.”54

Before long, prosecutors could no longer contain their anger at the direction the trial had taken. Weisswasser told the Detroit News that “the defense is cloaking its real intentions.... [I]t is our theory that this trial is being used to abet the purpose of a certain radical, and, by their chosen word, revolutionary labor groups.... Johnson is being used as a cat’s paw in a mockery of legal defense.”55 Not surprisingly, when it came time for prosecutors to begin their cross-examination, they repeatedly asked Johnson whether he himself had been a member of ELRUM or the League when he worked in the plant and whether he had read the radical newspaper Inner City Voice.

The trial took a new turn, however, when the prosecutors began questioning Johnson’s politics. Prosecutors were attempting to discredit Johnson, and all of the people who testified on his behalf from the plants, by suggesting that they were black militants bent on revolution. In the end, this new tactic was a grave mistake, as it allowed the defense the opportunity to show that political, as well as racial, discrimination existed at Chrysler, and that this political discrimination also had a deleterious effect on Johnson’s mental health. To support this point, Cockrel introduced a report from a certified psychologist who had examined Johnson before the trial began. Johnson had related to this examiner that he felt “that supervisors at the Chrysler Corporation thought, perhaps, that he was a member of a subversive group and that this was the likely reason that he was getting what he felt was a ‘raw deal.’”56 The defense also submitted a letter from Fitzgerald, who had written, again before the trial, that Johnson believed “management wanted him out because they felt he was a ‘revolutionist.’”57 Cockrel and Ravitz reminded the jury of Johnson’s testimony that he “was not a member of the League or ELRUM,” and that he did not even know who put out the Inner City Voice. The prosecution persisted, however, and asked whether Johnson was influenced by any of these radical organizations when he worked at Chrysler. Johnson replied that they only “affected his attitude on the job ... in so far as that which he read [by them] was true,” and he knew “some of that which [their papers] contained is factual because he has seen it himself inside of the plant.”58

Of course, many black autoworkers had endured a childhood of poverty and racism and had grown up to face much overt racial, and even political, discrimination in the workplace. Thus it was necessary for Cockrel and Ravitz to explain why, in Johnson’s case, this lifetime of oppression resulted in murder. To do this, they attempted to link the testimony about Johnson’s mental illness to that about the workplace protest of the other Eldon workers. They pointed out that life at Eldon was clearly so difficult that it drove many Eldon workers to wage group protests like wildcatting and individual protests like staying home from work. They then argued that the same events that only frustrated and angered other workers drove Johnson, with his particular psychological profile, to commit an insane act of violence.

Because of Johnson’s background, he already had “a suspicion, fear, distrust, and dislike of white people, such as plantation owners and other white people.”59 Thus, when he arrived at Chrysler, he was especially sensitive to and bothered by the fact that “all of the men on the oven line are Negroes,” and that his foreman routinely verbally abused him with racial slurs. According to Cockrel and Ravitz, the longer that Johnson worked at Chrysler, the more he became convinced that he was being persecuted. When Johnson took his vacation and then received a telegram from Chrysler saying that he had been absent without properly notifying the plant and that his employment was terminated, he was devastated. Likewise, when he was denied medical benefits after his car accident, he felt singled out and vulnerable. When he was not allowed to fill in for his friend Robert Baynes as a job setter because his foreman “went over and got one of his friends and gave him two weeks on company time to learn the job,”60 he became even more emotionally distressed. When supervisors finally ordered Johnson to go back to his old despised job on the oven line on July 15, 1970, he had finally reached his breaking point.

Clarence Horton testified that “no one once asked James Johnson why he didn’t want to go that oven,”61 and even though he tried to get Johnson a heat pass, there was nothing he could do. Chrysler managers had “already made their mind up”62 to suspend Johnson for insubordination. General Foreman Ellsworth J. Rhodes testified that “Hugh Jones was determined and the decision was really made by him quickly.”63 Johnson thought he had been fired and that his persecutors had won. Losing his long-sought-after job was an indescribable blow to his pride. According to the defense, Johnson’s already precarious hold on sanity finally slipped away.

To illustrate Johnson’s terrible psychotic state on the day of the murders, Cockrel reminded the jurors of Johnson’s testimony that he didn’t even know Joe Kowalski and that he and Gary Hinz actually had “a friendly relationship.” Two summers before the murders, Hinz had come to Johnson’s house to sell him a lawn mower for thirty dollars, even though Hinz had paid a hundred and forty dollars for it himself.64 The fact that Hugh Jones was only Johnson’s temporary foreman and that he, too, was black was further evidence, according to the defense, that Johnson had truly snapped.

The trump card in the Johnson defense strategy was the decision to take the jury to the scene of the murders. Early on in the trial, Cockrel had told the jury that “we have asked that you have an opportunity to view department 78, the cement room [and] the oven. And we will ask you to judge those conditions as the testimony develops them, as James Johnson felt them and as you view them, remember[ing] always that the standard is not any person’s capability to withstand stress, but James Johnson’s given his history, his background, his weaknesses and his state of mind.”65 The judge granted this unusual request. Perhaps more than any other evidence presented in the trial, the trip to the Eldon plant had the greatest impact on the jury.

On a Thursday morning, Judge Colombo, the entire jury, and Johnson boarded a bus and went to the Eldon plant. Covering the jury’s sojourn to the plant, the Michigan Chronicle reported sarcastically that “going and coming from Eldon Ave. Thursday morning, Johnson sat on the back of the bus.”66 It noted further that on the day of the jury’s tour, Chrysler had made sure “the plant was spic and span,” and although “they didn’t roll out a red carpet for the jurors ... the walls were freshly painted in bright colors and the aisles were open and ... Eldon Ave. looked as if Mr Clean, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the White Tornado had gone through it.” Once inside the plant, Johnson looked around him and quietly stated, “it wasn’t like this when I was here.”67

Despite the fact that Eldon was spruced up considerably, and was much cooler both in and outside of the facility than it had been on the day of the murders,68 the jury was noticeably appalled by the plant’s atmosphere and work conditions. The jurors who were, or who had been, auto employees looked around with grim recognition, and the jurors who were wives of auto employees looked around the plant with a sober appreciation for their husbands’ work life. Chrysler had shut down the assembly line for the jury tour, but the assembly line workers were still there, staring on in silence. As the jury began to watch the ovens being loaded, and as they paused to examine the asbestos-lined gloves needed to perform the oven-line job, the workers standing by raised their fists in solidarity with Johnson. As the Michigan Chronicle reported, “a young black man yelled ... ‘hey Brother Johnson,’” and according to Time Magazine, the gazes of the workers there “reflected little anger and much sympathy; there were muffled cries of ‘Hey, Brother Johnson ... Right on, Brother Johnson.’”69

The trip to Eldon was the most important moment in the trial. Better than all of Cockrel’s and Ravitz’s eloquent words, the experience of being inside the plant impressed upon the jury the alienating and dangerous nature of the oven job. They could better understand why Johnson had been devastated when he thought that he had been demoted to that job on the morning of July 15. Better than all of the passionate testimony provided by other workers on Johnson’s behalf, the sight of the workers with fists raised at Eldon impressed upon the jury that even if Johnson was insane, other workers in Detroit obviously understood why he had snapped. Undoubtedly jurors already were becoming more sympathetic to the defense, particularly after “the prosecutor [had been] talking of ‘black boys’ and asking one of Johnson’s cousins whether she ever slept with him,” but the trip to Eldon seemed to cement the defense’s case in their eyes.70

On the last day of the trial, after Weisswasser referred to Johnson as “just a big baby” in his closing remarks,71 Cockrel once again approached the jury. He summarized the abundance of testimony they had heard on Johnson’s deprived childhood, on the racial harassment that he had always endured, on his related mental instability, and on the particular events that led to a complete breakdown on July 15. Cockrel then reminded the jury of all the possible verdicts, highlighting what proof was necessary for an insanity acquittal. He left the jurors to their deliberations with the closing remark, “the defense maintains that the prosecution has not proven, as is their clear and undisputed burden, James Johnson, legally sane beyond a reasonable doubt.” Therefore, he went on, Johnson deserved the verdict not guilty by reason of insanity, even though this verdict was not “just,” as real “justice escaped James Johnson in a very real way three and a half decades ago back on an American plantation.”72

The jury deliberated for only three hours and forty-six minutes. The jurors argued and yelled so loudly while coming to their decision that they were often overheard.73 According to Time, one juror was heard to exclaim, “Did you see that cement room in the plant? Working there would drive anyone crazy!”74 Another more skeptical juror was heard saying, “I’ve worked in a factory all my life and I didn’t kill anybody,” to which a another juror replied, “you weren’t born in Mississippi and I was; you don’t know what you’re talking about!”75 Before deliberations ended, a fourth juror was heard saying loudly, “the man needs help. You know he won’t get it in prison. It’s up to us to help him.”76 As the jury returned to the courtroom, Johnson sat quietly wondering what lie ahead of him while the Detroiters who packed the courtroom also sat on the edge of their seats. As the media looked on, the jury delivered its verdict: not guilty by reason of insanity. According to the Michigan Chronicle, this jury verdict “electrified the courtroom” while “James Johnson slumped over, hands clasped behind his neck ... wept. The sobs shook his body.”77 After reading their verdict, members of the jury crowded around Cockrel. According to one of the jurors, those on the panel felt warmly toward Cockrel and wanted to talk with him.78 As writers for the Michigan Chronicle noted when the trial ended, “no television production could match this case for sheer drama.”79

As a result of his successes in the courtroom during New Bethel One and Two, and then the Johnson murder trial, Cockrel became one of he most famous and infamous attorneys in the Motor City. That Cockrel was a self-avowed Marxist and a leader of the League did not escape his critics or supporters. In every civic and labor battle since 1967, from those over shop-floor relations and working conditions to those in city schools or involving police-community relations, the Left in Detroit had been a powerful force to reckon with. This fact was underscored when, in December 1971, mere months after the Johnson acquittal, Cockrel successfully defended another young black man, Nathaniel Johnson, accused of assault with intent to rob officers of the STRESS unit. During this trial before Judge Roy N. Gruenburg, an all-black jury of nine men and three women deliberated only forty minutes before acquitting Cockrel’s client.80

Without a doubt, the New Bethel and Johnson verdicts made Detroit’s revolutionaries feel that they were making genuine headway in the city. Spurred on by their courtroom victories, Cockrel, other leftist groups, and the family of STRESS victim Clarence Manning Jr. decided to file a civil law-suit against Mayor Gribbs, Police Commissioner John Nichols, and Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan, so that the trio would be forced to disband all STRESS operations.81

In the anti-STRESS suit of 1972, plaintiffs detailed the circumstances leading to five civilian deaths at the hands of STRESS officers in one “dreary, soot-dirty block of transient hotels, bars and unrazed century-old homes ... an area populated with a large number of alcoholics, panhandlers and derelicts—mostly harmless people who are guilty only of [the] institutionally created crimes of poverty, unemployment and disease.”82 The official complaint of this suit laid out the events leading to the murder of Manning in the most detail, because on May 28, 1971, at 10:30 p.m., STRESS officers had fired eighteen shots at the unarmed Manning and one of the seven that actually hit him was fatal. In addition, this suit compiled dramatic statistics on the number of deaths that particular STRESS officers had caused. And because so many fatal STRESS actions had gone unpunished, plaintiffs took the opportunity in this suit to officially accuse Prosecutor Cahalan of knowing that “the Detroit Police officers connected with the unit known as STRESS have engaged in illegal, wrongful, criminal and unconstitutional beatings, shootings and killings,” and that he “has failed, refused and prevented any criminal prosecutions against such officers.”83

For white conservatives such as Mayor Gribbs and Commissioner Nichols, as well as those who either were themselves or actively defended members of the DPD, the anti-STRESS suit of 1972 was a serious threat. Not only were civic radicals challenging them, but so were a number of well-established liberal organizations such as the NAACP and the ACLU. And while these groups were signing on as plaintiffs, workplace organizations such as the UNC also began speaking out in support of the suit.84 This biracial challenge to law enforcement became even more unsettling to white conservatives when the anti-STRESS suit showed up on the court docket of a black judge.85 Although this judge, Edward Bell, was hardly a left-leaning liberal himself, he was African American, and every city conservative knew well what a poor reputation STRESS had among Detroit blacks, regardless of their class position or political persuasion. But just as it began to appear that radicals and civil rights–oriented liberals would score another victory on the legal battlefield of the war-torn Motor City, Judge Bell stepped down to pursue his own political ambitions, and thereafter the controversial anti-STRESS suit was reassigned to Judge John O’Hair, former counsel for the Detroit Police Officers Association.

Kenneth V. Cockrel speaking at the March 26, 1972, anti-STRESS rally. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

The implications of this turn of events were vast. Radicals such as Ken Cockrel experienced a real set-back when, after four days of graphic testimony, Judge O’Hair decided he need not render an emergency decision, and thus the case was destined for the regular docket, where it could languish for years. And liberals also felt defeated by O’Hair’s ruling because it thwarted their attempt to prove that the legal system would indeed resolve thorny social problems in expeditious fashion. But while the de facto victors in the anti-STRESS suit—white conservatives and the Gribbs administration—should have been elated, they were still uneasy. To them, as long as blacks or liberals—or, worse yet, black liberals—were on the bench in the Motor City, their interests were not secure. Only fueling this fear, a biracial group called the Labor Defense Coalition, the first-listed plaintiff in the anti-STRESS suit Cockrel, vowed that the citizens of Detroit “will not wait two years for ‘justice.’”86 Indeed, city radicals did not have to wait hardly any time at all to reseek “justice” in their campaign against STRESS. Despite the number of reforms that Mayor Gribbs had insisted on after the debacle on Rochester Street,87 an event transpired on December 4, 1972, between four STRESS officers and three young black men that once again brought this police unit into the media spotlight and once again allowed Cockrel a chance to challenge STRESS in court.

Because Mayor Gribbs’s new reforms were intended to make STRESS more efficient and organized and did not eliminate its undercover features, black fear of the police only escalated after 1971.88 Well aware of this fear, a local newspaper The Community Reporter took the time in 1972 to inform black Detroiters about “what to do in the case of STRESS.”89 But the problem with such advice was that in every STRESS maneuver that ended in a citizen death, the victim did not know that he or she was being accosted or questioned by a member of law enforcement, as STRESS officers were always dressed as hippies or street people. And because STRESS patrolled areas already full of hippies and street people, ordinary citizens had no reason to believe that a strange individual approaching them was anything other than he or she appeared to be.

One such neighborhood, which not only was filled with the eclectic and the down and out but also with an active drug trade, was home to three young black men: Hayward Brown, Marcus Clyde Bethune, and John Percy Boyd. Brown was an eighteen-year-old who had joined the Sons of Malcolm X in the twelfth grade. Brown’s first cousin, Boyd, was a student at Wayne State University who worked with underprivileged kids at the Detroit Department of Parks and Recreation. Bethune was also a college student at WSU.90

By his senior year of high school, Brown had become deeply influenced by Malcolm X’s position that young black men had to be free of drugs in order to fight most effectively for black liberation. According to Brown, in 1972, he, Bethune, and Boyd “decided that someone needed to move on the dope men” in their neighborhood. As he put it, “we saw the situation getting worse. More and more dope was coming into the community and making more junkies, and the designated authorities weren’t doing their jobs.”91 Within a few months Brown, Bethune, and Boyd were known in their community as foes of the drug trade.92

On December 4, 1972, Brown, Bethune, and Boyd decided to escalate their anti-drug activism and go to a known heroin house in their neighborhood, run by a man named Jack Crawford. They had intended to oust this big-time dealer and thus arrived with guns “for the purposes of self-defense because it is a known fact that dope men are armed.”93 Unbeknownst to the trio, however, four STRESS officers—Richard Grapp, Eugene Fuller, Robert Rosenow, and Billy Price—had also decided to take their unmarked four-door Plymouth sedan to stake out Crawford’s house that night.94

As soon as Brown, Bethune, and Boyd arrived at Crawford’s house in their Volkswagen Beetle, Crawford saw them and sped off in his car. The trio chased him, and in turn, STRESS officers followed the VW in their white sedan.95 According to Brown, as he and his friends were following Crawford, a white car started to force them to the side of the road, and they believed that the vehicle contained Crawford’s henchmen. Eventually, the STRESS car collided with the VW. Whereas the STRESS officers claimed later that they then showed Brown, Bethune, and Boyd their badges (which they forgot to note in the police report they eventually had to file), the young black occupants of the VW claimed that these scruffy-looking men pulled guns on them. Within minutes, bullets were flying, and someone in the VW managed to wound several occupants of the white Plymouth.

After the shooting melee, Brown, Bethune, and Boyd drove the VW to Dexter Avenue, where they abandoned the car and decided to take a cab to the house of one of their mothers. Deeply fearful of retaliation from Crawford’s drug runners, the three men “started staying in motels for the first few days” and then moved from one friend’s house to another “for their own security.”96 Meanwhile, the DPD had put out an all-points bulletin on these three men and were combing the streets of Detroit for them. On December 7, STRESS officers burst into the apartment of Patricia Ragland and forced her to undress while they searched her home for Brown, Bethune, and Boyd. As her fiancé, Carl Ingram, exclaimed incredulously while the search was taking place, “there ain’t three men hiding in her clothes!”97 On December 8, DPD officers stormed the home of Durwood Forshee while looking for the fugitives and, in the process, managed fatally to shoot Forshee as he slept in his bed. After the Forshee murder, on December 15, 1972, the family members of Brown, Bethune, and Boyd went to the Wayne Country Circuit Court to get an injunction against the DPD for its raids on black homes. Judge Thomas Foley readily granted the injunction forbidding the DPD from entering any home without a warrant except in an emergency,98 but on January 4, 1973, “police burst into Reverend Leroy Cannon’s house without a warrant on a false tip that the fugitives were hiding there, yelling ‘Nigger if you breathe too loud, I’ll blow your brains out!’”99

One of the reasons that the police did not heed Judge Foley’s injunction was that on December 27, 1972, four STRESS officers had experienced yet another deadly run-in with Brown, Bethune, and Boyd. On this day, four plainclothes STRESS officers—Robert Dooley, Robert Bradford, Charles Sauvage, and Donald Lewis—in another unmarked car surrounded the apartment where Brown, Bethune, and Boyd were hiding. When the unsuspecting trio came out of the building, Officer Dooley grabbed Brown to use him as a shield while he shot at Bethune, who then ran up to Dooley and shot him in the face. Meanwhile, someone fired a shot that killed Officer Bradford. According to the later testimony of twenty-eight-year-old Dooley, who ultimately lost one eye and was paralyzed from the waist down as a result of his injuries, “Bethune was kicking me and I could see, he like walked like stomping on my leg and my back and he was saying ‘we’re going to kill all you white Mo-F pigs, all you white pigs are going to die in this town, we’re going to kill you all!’”100

In the midst of this chaos, Brown, Bethune, and Boyd somehow managed to escape once again, which set in motion “the most massive manhunt in Detroit’s history.”101 The DPD not only continued to comb Detroit’s black neighborhoods looking for the three fugitives, but it also extended its search around the country. The DPD sent descriptions of the three men to authorities in cities such as Charlotte, North Carolina; Chicago; and Cincinnati.102 It also maintained surveillance on every member of the trio’s family when it heard a rumor that someone at the University of Greensboro was going to help Boyd leave Detroit.103

Despite this extensive dragnet, however, Bethune and Boyd allegedly disguised, respectively, as a priest and a nun, managed to flee to Atlanta, where they were subsequently killed under highly suspicious circumstances in a blazing shootout with police between February 23 and 27, 1973.104 Before Bethune and Boyd met this fate, however, the DPD still believed them to be in the Motor City, and they escalated their search operations there accordingly. They soon arrested a man named Ivan O. Williams for harboring the fugitives, but they still were unable to apprehend the “Mad Dog Killers” as Police Commissioner Nichols had referred to them. Overnight, citizens began flooding the Police-Community Relations Commission of the CCR with complaints about out-of-control police brutality. In response, the Detroit City Council decided to call a public hearing to allow citizens to voice their grievances and, in turn, to give Police Commissioner Nichols the opportunity to explain his officers’ actions. Initially, the council planned to hold this meeting in the auditorium of the City County Building, but the overflow of 900 to 1,000 people forced it to move the hearing to Ford Auditorium.

Police manhunt of Hayward Brown at a house on Trumbull Avenue, January 12, 1923. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

At this mass event on January 11, 1973, black Detroiters crowded the microphones provided to read their complaints. The principle complainants were there on behalf of John Boyd including Melba Boyd and John Clore; his mother, Dorothy Clore; a family friend, Sandra Overstreet; and relatives of Ivan Williams. But many who were neither friends nor relations of the fugitives also spoke at this meeting, while Cockrel attempted to present the City Council members with a box containing 30,000 citizen signatures calling for the abolition of STRESS. Eventually, it was time for Commissioner Nichols to respond to the numerous grievances voiced, but when he tried to speak, “the crowd became quite angry and noisy,” and after several attempts to read a prepared statement, he was forced to leave the stage because of the audience’s jeers and shouts.105

As fate would have it, the next day, two of WSU’s Public Safety officers, Robert Oliphant and Leonard Corsetti, located Hayward Brown. As Corsetti attempted to arrest Brown, he fired a shot that prompted Brown to return fire. But because DPD backup was almost immediately on the scene, this time the police apprehended Brown, who subsequently was charged with seven counts of assault with intent to commit murder and one count of first-degree murder. Because Chief Prosecutor William Cahalan refused to consolidate the charges, Brown prepared to stand trial three separate times.

Although attorney Richard Soble represented Brown at his arraignment, Cockrel soon took on the defense. And, when Brown’s trial began, it immediately became a media circus. Assisting Cockrel was his partner, Ted Spearman Jr., as well as a court-appointed associate, Geoffrey Taft. Thomas Behan was the assistant prosecutor on this case, and the judge randomly assigned to the first trial was none other than George Crockett. A jury of seven black women, three black men, and two white women sat in this first trial in which Brown stood accused of four counts of assault with intent to commit murder from the December 4 shootout with STRESS officers Price, Grapp, Rosenow, and Fuller.

As transcripts reveal, however, from the moment that Brown’s trial began, it was STRESS in the hot seat, not the eighteen-year-old defendant. It was not that Brown was irrelevant to the trial; indeed, many witnesses, including a priest from St. Francis De Sales, came to refute Commissioner Nichols’s characterization of him as a “Mad Dog Killer.” Most of the testimony, however, involved establishing exactly what STRESS was doing on the night of December 4, why it had such a high suspect fatality rate to its credit, and how the undercover nature of its operations could lead so easily to tragedies such as the Rochester Street murders and the shootings of December 4.

Police manhunt of Hayward Brown near Wayne State University, January 12, 1923. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

When Cockrel questioned Officer Rosenow, for example, jurors heard the following exchange:

Q: Did you have any legal reason to stop that car? Had they violated any law in your judgement and experience as a police officer?

A: No Sir. They had not violated any law.

When questioning Officer Grapp, Cockrel asked:

Q: You just decided to stop it, isn’t that right?

A: I decided I would stop them because of their activity in the neighborhood.

Q: Their activity is that they were operating, I assume lawfully, a motor vehicle in the neighborhood, isn’t that correct?

A: Yes.106

In yet another telling exchange, Cockrel additionally asked Rosenow to explain why he carried a .44 magnum on the night in question instead of the standard-issue .38 special. Rosenow replied, “I feel that the .38 Special lacks penetrating power.”107 The jury also heard testimony that all STRESS officers present that night were dressed nothing like members of law enforcement and that there was no corroborating evidence that these officers ever identified themselves as such to Brown, Bethune, and Boyd.108 But the most exculpatory evidence on Brown’s behalf was that none of the STRESS officers who testified had actually seen him shooting at them.109 Trial transcripts reveal that the prosecution was not very well prepared or effective in making its arguments during the trial, whereas the defense’s portrayal of STRESS’S vigilante-like and dangerous secrecy came through loud and clear. On May 10, 1973, the jury acquitted Brown on all charges after ten hours of deliberation.

But Brown’s tribulations were far from over. He once again had to stand trial for the December 27, 1972, altercation between himself, Bethune, Boyd, and STRESS officers Dooley, Sauvage, Lewis, and Bradford. In this case, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder and assault with intent to commit murder. For days, the jury of eight blacks and four whites heard testimony from Prosecutor Leonard Gilman’s police officer witnesses, and then it was transported, as the Johnson jury had been, out of the courtroom to hear the testimony of Officer Robert Dooley, who lay paralyzed and blinded in his hospital bed. During this portion of the trial, Cockrel strenuously objected that, unlike Johnson, Brown had been taken to the hospital in chains and thus that the judge, Clarence Laster Jr., was not so subtly lending credence to the “Mad Dog Killer” image of Brown that the prosecution was trying to promote.110 But apparently, Cockrel was not too rattled by the prosecution’s presentation of witnesses because, in a shocking move, he ultimately decided not to call any witnesses for the defense. He maintained that the prosecution had not even come close to proving the murder charge, and that there already was sufficient evidence to indicate that the assault charge was bogus as well. While Judge Laster agreed to dismiss the murder charge, he still insisted that the jury rule on the assault charge. After only two hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Brown of assault as well.111

After this acquittal, Brown then stood trial on the final charges stemming from the shootings of the two safety patrol officers at WSU, who finally had apprehended him that January. For this trial, William Cahalan, head Wayne County prosecutor, personally got involved. Cahalan did not like the fact that the presiding judge, Samuel Gardner, had previously been a partner in the law firm that had represented Brown before Cockrel took his case.112 Cahalan was not alone in showing particular interest in Brown’s last trial. As conservative talk-show host Lou Gordon told his Detroit listeners, “I’m going to have a great deal to say about Hayward Brown when his trials are over.... It seems to me that having been present [in the other trials] he should not have been let off completely free.”113 But despite Cahalan’s active assistance of the prosecutor in charge of this third case, James E. Lacey, a jury of nine men and three women nevertheless acquitted Brown of any wrongdoing after a two-hour deliberation, including a dinner break, on July 7, 1973.114 According to the Detroit Free Press, “about 40 spectators in the courtroom of Judge Samuel Gardner cheered when the verdict was read.”115

Hayward Brown, May 11, 1973. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

The verdict and courtroom reaction infuriated Prosecutor Cahalan and many other supporters of law enforcement in Detroit.116 Cahalan argued publicly that the verdict was both “wrong and a miscarriage of justice”117 As one journalist opined, “Cahalan is angry because the people who prosecutors traditionally counted on to bring in guilty verdicts—white, middle class men—aren’t showing up on Detroit juries as much as they used to.”118 After the third Brown acquittal, Cahalan and others began to suggest the appointment, rather than the election, of criminal court judges. As Cahalan stated in a press conference after the acquittal, “his [Judge Gardner’s] instructions to the jury sounded like those of a defense attorney. Gardner should not have been the judge in this case.” Cahalan then went on to suggest that the state legislature revisit the rules regarding jury selection.119

The white conservatives’ fear that the judicial system was fast slipping into the hands of Detroit’s white and black radicals was fueled not only by the New Bethel, Johnson, and Brown verdicts, but also by the fact that, the previous November, Detroiters had elected radical Justin Ravitz, Cockrel’s law partner, to a ten-year term as a judge for the Detroit Recorder’s Court. A co-counsel with Cockrel on the New Bethel and Johnson cases and a lawyer for the anti-STRESS suit of 1972, Ravitz now would preside over the trials of hundreds of blacks accused of criminal offenses. Detroit’s conservative whites believed firmly that the popular support behind jurists like Ravitz was an ominous sign for the city’s political future. They were appalled that Ravitz’s enormous support among poor and working-class black Detroiters had allowed him to come in second, with 130,514 votes out of the fourteen candidates running.120 They were equally troubled by fact that Ravitz had won by reminding these voters of his “successful defense of the two New Bethel cases, including the exposé of the wholesale and criminal exclusion of thousands of qualified jurors,” and of his “successful defense of James Johnson ... who was proven to be no more than a victim of racism and corporate greed.”121

That Ravitz had not been supported solely by Detroit’s African Americans nor only by radicals clearly added to conservative whites’ disgust. The Ravitz campaign had also been endorsed by top liberal politicians at the local and state level, including State Senator Coleman Young, State Representative Jackie Vaughan III, City Councilman Carl Levin, and the First, Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Seventeenth Congressional District Democratic party organizations. Reflecting conservatives’ deepening antagonism toward Detroit’s liberals after Ravitz’s election, a spokesman from the Detroit Bar Association proclaimed that such an election “indicates the necessity for further removing the selection of judges from the people.”122

The city’s conservative whites found the cumulative legal losses between 1969 and 1973 staggering. They were humbled during the New Bethel trials, but they still held out hope that these cases were an anomaly. By 1973, however, they felt deflated by how many times the police had been censured in the judicial process, and they were thoroughly persuaded that liberals were conspiring with radicals to turn Detroit into a crime zone. As one A. J. Kalber put it in a letter to the Detroit News after one such censuring of the police in the legal arena, “was it by luck or arrangement of counsel that the black groups ... had their case assigned, through the so-called blind-draw assignment system, to the only black judge in the Wayne Country Circuit Court? Now how about abolishing the present court assignment system which obviously permits litigants to select their own judges.”123 And it hardly alleviated the concerns of men like Kalber that black jurists like Crockett had gone on record saying, “I happen to know from my own experiences that a policeman will tell a lie in court. I happen to know that they’ll crack somebody’s head—especially if it is a black head—and then bring that person into court expecting the judge to convict him so that the policeman can’t be sued for damages.”124

It was Hayward Brown’s three acquittals, however, far more than the words of a black judge, that most alarmed conservative white Detroiters. As the more conservative of the two major Motor City newspapers, the Detroit News, editorialized on June 10, 1973, because of “Kenneth Cockrel’s play upon racial emotion and presentation of Brown as a victim of oppressive society ... Brown emerges from all of this as a sort of ghetto folk hero ... [and this] has served to damage public confidence in the legal processes.”125 The various authors of letters to the Detroit News on July 16, 1973, couldn’t have agreed more. As Richard Haefner of the white suburb of St. Clair Shores wrote, “Kenneth Cockrel has proven conclusively that the jury system is no longer responsive to the people and needs immediate revision if justice is to prevail.” S. K. Pullen of suburban Belleville wrote, “The next time anyone is tried for murder in Detroit why don’t they pick a jury from among the convicted murderers serving terms in Jackson State Prison? Detroit is a city run by emotion and minorities. The law is just a name in Detroit.” And as another writer G. F. Parsons maintained, “Hayward Brown’s victory in a courtroom verdict by a black judge and jury may turn out to be one of the most disastrous events in the history of Detroit’s race relations.”126

By 1973, conservative whites firmly believed that radicals were taking over Detroit and that liberals were no longer simply fueling dependency through their myriad community programs—now they actually were catering to black criminals in their own courtrooms. For example, Conservative whites found it outrageous that in the 1971 trial of black Detroiter Nathaniel Johnson, which daily drew “standing-room-only crowds,” the presiding judge “refused to allow the prosecution to bring into evidence fragments of a broken glass bottle, alleged to be one of the weapons used by Johnson and Manning against one of the STRESS officers. The Judge ruled that the bottle fragments could not be brought into evidence because police had remained on the street for several hours and could have tampered with it.”127

The legal battles from 1969 to 1973 convinced conservative white Detroiters that something had fundamentally changed within the liberal agenda. With liberals now in cahoots with radicals to promote black interests over white, conservatives considered it even more imperative that both be ousted from any sphere of influence. As a writer in the Detroit Police Officer Association paper, Tuebor, put it, “DETROIT is Number One in Rapes/Number One in Murder/Number One in Chicken-hearted Judges,” and another cautioned that before long Detroiters would see “Kenneth Cockrel as mayor ... George Crockett as head of the Supreme Court, or the Black Panthers in charge of Community Relations.”128

But just as white conservatives were shocked by the acquittals of black defendants and the legal setbacks of the DPD over the period 1969-1973, so were city blacks. For years, black Detroiters had deeply distrusted the judicial process, as white police officers routinely went free after victimizing African Americans. As Detroiter Rosetta Sadler wrote after white jurors acquitted the white police officers charged with murdering the young African Americans at the Algiers Motel in 1967, “the American courts have done it again. It was done like it has always been done since black people came to this country.... Not a court in this state would have accepted an all-black jury to sit on the jury for a black man.”129 After the New Bethel trials, however, just such an “impossibility” became possible. As the Inner City Voice put it, “The change in the jury selection process, which was by far the greatest victory to come out of the New Bethel Incident and trials ... many people, especially blacks will continue to benefit. Already, scores of lawyers have filed appeals on behalf of clients to grant them new and fairer trials.”130

And the Johnson verdict in 1971 only fueled the dawning hope among many still-suspicious city blacks that maybe the New Bethel trial verdicts had not been a fluke. While not every black Detroiter agreed with the Inner City Voice that Johnson had rung “the bell of justice” when he committed murder (indeed, many condemned his violent act), they were pleasantly surprised nevertheless that “the system” actually was able to see men like Johnson not simply as “black criminals” but as victims of the social ills of racism and oppressive employment.131

Just as city blacks supported the Johnson verdict even while many of them disliked the actions that Johnson himself had taken, so were they pleased by the outcome of the Brown trials without necessarily believing him to be a saint. Indeed, the severe injuries suffered by Officer Dooley in altercations with Brown and his cohorts gave many a Detroiter pause. But given the historic and outrageous offenses committed by STRESS officers against city blacks, the question of Brown’s “innocence” became secondary to that of whether the police would finally be censured in court. City blacks supported the Brown acquittals first and foremost because they represented a victory for the black community over the police—no matter what the particular circumstances that had led to that triumph. And because these legal triumphs had been facilitated and celebrated by city liberals, city blacks previously disgusted with liberalism began to look at it more favorably. They, too, assumed that Detroit’s liberals must have really changed.

But while black radicals conceded that black judge George Crockett was “just about the most together Brother on the bench,” they themselves were not seduced into the liberal fold.132 As Cockrel had put it about Crockett’s New Bethel judicial activism, “everyone is going around saluting Judge Crockett for having followed the law which was not a revolutionary act, but had revolutionary consequences in a state who is not accustomed to the law being followed.”133 But Detroit’s radicals feared that, unlike them, Detroit’s poor and working-class black residents were perhaps exaggerating the long-term benefits of such legal victories, which is what was really luring them back to liberalism. To combat this trend, the Detroit Left sought to make it abundantly clear that they, not liberal judges or officials, were the reason why the down and out were finally being heard in the Motor City. As some radicals had put it after the New Bethel victories, “Those who are now saying that ‘the fact that the New Bethel trials wound up as they did is an illustration of the extent to which genuine democracy operates within the system’ are liars. The fact of the matter is that the defense in all of the cases, and the persons involved in the defense in all of the cases, had to force the system ... to produce the results over which the ‘liberals’ are now clucking and which have the conservatives, especially those who are alive, turning over in their graves.”134

Overall, however, city radicals made little progress when they tried to keep average black Detroiters from feeling more charitable toward liberals, particularly black liberals like Crockett. Not only did the city’s black community come to see “the system” more favorably after the New Bethel, Johnson, and Brown verdicts, but it was equally heartened by the election of Justin Ravitz to Detroit’s Recorder’s Court. After this election, the Ravitz camp had noted that “Detroiters proved then that an independent people’s political movement with real roots in the community can engage in the electoral process and win,” and that “it is possible to struggle and win power to concretely improve the lives of people while utilizing their system.”135 And, of course, the victories over the police in the Brown trials only cemented community optimism in what could be achieved by working through established channels. Detroiters were thrilled that “no longer would police testimony necessarily be accepted above that of the citizen. No longer would the court’s rulings necessarily support the judgement of police. No longer could law enforcement be above the law.”136

While the Detroit Left worried deeply about this renewed African American faith in liberalism, the civic liberals who had felt under siege by both radicals and conservatives since 1967 welcomed it. Indeed, even though a conservative mayor still ran the city, with another mayoral election on the horizon, liberals felt newly hopeful about their chances to lead Detroit into the future. To city liberals, it had been a key victory that the bulk of radical political and social activism had been channeled from the unwieldy, dangerous, and unpredictable arena of the city’s streets into a much more civilized and familiar arena—its courtrooms. Liberals were delighted that they had finally proved the legal system capable of responding fairly to the concerns of Detroiters who long had been discriminated against.

Even though so many Detroiters now believed that, for better or worse, liberal leaders had changed their stripes by 1973, liberals themselves maintained that they were responding to urban problems just as they always had. To a significant degree, they were right. As their myriad TAP programs illustrated, Detroit’s liberal leaders had repeatedly tried to channel dissent from the streets and into established institutions. And, as the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s makes clear, they also had been known to encourage flexible interpretations of the law in order to fight discrimination. Even the controversial stands that these leaders had taken during the New Bethel and Johnson trials were not as radical as they might at first appear. From their perspective, these trials were simply a practical application of the long-held liberal principle that white atonement for past racial sins was a component of making progress toward racial equality.137 As Mayor Cavanagh had stated to the Kerner Commission several years earlier: “We must frankly face up to the need to consider and accept a new principle ... the principle of reparation for long standing injustice dating back to the generations preceding ours ... The price that they [blacks] have paid has been incalculable. Now the nation must, I believe, begin to make reparation—for the deeds of past generations, and of our own.”

Whatever the ideological continuity in the liberal agenda, civic liberals clearly had pursued racial equality through the court system more aggressively between 1969 and 1973. City liberals had become more activist both because they were forced to and because the trials gave some of them the opportunity to act on convictions that they had always held. Nevertheless, the fact was that white as well as black Detroiters from across the political spectrum were surprised when these liberals responded to urban crisis by allowing their agenda to be pushed to its most progressive limits. These citizens believed that liberals had recently experienced a dramatic change of heart. These perceptions about shifting liberal loyalties had enormous implications for the direction that Detroit politics would soon take.

Many city radicals had hoped that their successes in the judicial arena—like the election of Ravitz—would further radicalize Detroiters and make them more “committed to ongoing non-electoral efforts.”138 They hoped that they could “utilize their [the liberals’] system and at the same time maintain and strengthen non-electoral political work.”139 But, in fact, these successes were reconvincing black Detroiters that the way to social change was through the ballot box. Sensing the direction in which black politics were headed in 1973, Cockrel wondered publicly whether all of the effort expended on trials like Hayward Brown’s meant “that much in terms of furthering the movement, educating the people, or building an organization.... [W]hat if that same time and energy had been devoted toward building an organization? Would the effect have been broader and more important?”140

Cockrel’s question was particularly timely because, within a few months, a critical mayoral election would take place in Detroit, and the Left needed to decide what, if any, role it was going to play in it. Not surprisingly, the fate of the radical dissidents in city plants was relevant to these calculations. Given liberal desires to steal its thunder, the city Left would need the labor Left if it still hoped to influence Detroit’s political future.