4: Citizens, Politicians, and the Escalating War for Detroit’s Civic Future

Detroit had a reputation as the revolutionary capital of America. . . . There was a perception that Detroit might be up for grabs. There was a perception that there were enough cracks in the armor that maybe you could wrest control from the elites. . . . Detroit also was the center of all the anti-racism stuff going on in the country.1

As the Motor City and its auto plants slowly lurched toward social and political chaos between 1964 and 1967, James Johnson Jr. continued to go to work every day at Michigan Drum. Because he still made too little money to buy his own home, Johnson lived with various family members over the next two and a half years, including his sister Marva and his first cousin Maggie Foster Taylor.2 Maggie was born in 1927 in Crawford, Mississippi, very near Starksville.3 She had known Johnson since his birth, and it was her brother's lynching that had such a profoundly disturbing impact on him. Maggie had moved to Michigan in 1953. She managed to buy a home in July 1963, and from 1965 to 1970, James either lived with her or with Marva.

It was only two years after Johnson moved back to Detroit that poor urbanites there exploded in civic rebellion and autoworkers began lashing out at their line foremen. Because he was a loner, and usually came home from work every day to read the Bible or watch television, Johnson did not participate in either the city or workplace unrest of 1967. Like many other Detroiters, however, he knew firsthand what had precipitated such upheaval.

In July 1967, numerous Detroiters had chosen rebellion in the streets as the way to express their dismay with the liberal leadership’s inability to establish greater racial equality or reform the Detroit Police Department. Like their counterparts in the auto industry, they had taken the disappointments that followed the optimism of 1964 hard, and they had little patience left for liberal promises. Yet despite the tremendous shock of the civic uprising, between 1967 and 1972, white liberal leaders, along with their allies in the black middle class, still refused to abandon their plans to improve the city. The problem for these liberals was that, in this same period, grassroots discontent was finding expression in increasingly popular radical as well as conservative movements, both of which sought a complete political overhaul of the city. While civic liberals worried about these mounting assaults from both the Left and Right, at least initially they dismissed the right-wing challenge while they sought to appease their left-wing critics by putting new energy into already-discredited programs for change. Not surprisingly, rather than diffuse community discontent, this approach only fueled resentment. And, as civic radicals and conservatives alike began mobilizing to take power in Detroit, and a full-scale war for urban control began, the future of this city was completely up for grabs.

* * * *

From the moment that the residents of Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods went on their rampage of looting and arson in the wee hours of July 23, 1967, it was obvious that they were not just lashing out at members of law enforcement, figures against whom they had obvious grievances. They were also raging against the strategies and politics of white administration liberals and the middle-class black leaders of the city’s civil rights movement. As one observer of the chaos noted, “none of the so-called leaders [of the black community] were able to control or affect any aspect of the situation,” and, when black Congressman John Conyers arrived at the scene, he “was booed and stoned off the streets [and reportedly] his office was burned to the ground.” Most importantly, civic rebels were expressing their disappointment with black leaders, specifically in the language of black nationalism and revolution. For example, when black Congressman Charles Diggs arrived, hoping to bring calm to the situation, he was told, “Go home Diggs. . . . [W]e want Stokely Carmichael.”4

The arrival of this Black Power sentiment certainly caused Detroit’s liberal leaders to fear irreparable political divisiveness. And the reaction of racially conservative whites to the 1967 upheaval only confirmed these fears. Not only were such whites horrified by recent civic unrest, but many of them firmly believed that the city’s liberal leadership had taken exactly the wrong message from that upheaval. As one white Detroiter put it, “The nigger is being treated with velvet gloves by the politicians. White people are getting sore about all this soft-soaping. They’re using this riot idea to get something for nothing.”5 Civic leaders like Cavanagh were deeply alarmed by such white sentiments, because they indicated that restoring urban stability in the near future was unlikely. As Cavanagh wrote to David Brown, a researcher from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, “Detroit’s riot made it quite clear to me that America faces its gravest social crisis since Reconstruction. . . . [T]he problems of generations are residing in these cities.”6 But despite the growing threat of both black radical and white conservative critics in their city, liberal leaders were not yet ready to throw in the towel. They were heartened by the fact that at least some Detroiters were responding to the upheaval of 1967 by trying even harder to achieve racial cooperation and progress in ways familiar to them.

In 1968, Polish and black Detroiters came together, for example, to create the Black Polish Conference; a group of over “4,000 interested persons” that offered a forum for blacks and whites to improve communication.7 As its members believed, “Blacks and Poles share many of the same problems and that by working together, we can overcome these problems without losing our ethnic identities.”8 The Black Polish Conference was not the only group suggesting that biracial communication was still the answer to the city’s current crisis. Numbers of city residents were also in the process of reinvigorating the “block clubs” of the 1950s, hoping to encourage greater racial harmony by providing “a convenient meeting ground for both Negro and white residents who might otherwise have some difficulty relating to each other easily.”9 Other citizens, also both black and white, had come together after the chaos of 1967 to form an organization called Focus Hope, whose mission statement pledged “intelligent and practical activism to overcome racism.”10 When white Detroiter Eleanor Josaitis, along with Father William Cunningham, Father Jerome Fraser, and fifty priests connected with the civil rights movement, created Focus Hope, they “wanted the black and white community to work together.”11 Symbolically Focus Hope’s logo was a pair of hands, one white and one black, trying valiantly to reach each other.

Greatly encouraged by these signs of biracial cooperation, the Cavanagh administration created its own committee to deal with both the immediate crisis and long-term urban development issues. The Mayor’s Development Team (MDT) was intended to coordinate the actions of all public agencies, to address issues of most concern to city residents, and to create a “blueprint for the social and physical redevelopment of the city.”12 Simultaneously, several civic, business, labor, and civil rights leaders collectively formed the New Detroit Committee (or New Detroit), which brought together a diverse group of local luminaries, including Robert Tindal of the NAACP, Chrysler Chairman Lynne Townsend, and UAW President Walter Reuther. Once formed, New Detroit had a leadership committee comprised of thirty-nine members, nine of whom were black. Out of the hundred-person New Detroit staff, fifteen were black.13 New Detroit was intended to be a counterpart to the MDT, marshaling private as opposed to public funds to rebuild the city. The sheer size, scope, and budget of New Detroit meant that it would be the backbone of any liberal attempt to improve conditions in the Motor City and regain political legitimacy after 1967.

But New Detroit had a difficult task. The organization could ill afford to alienate the city’s growing radical or growing conservative contingents. To straddle such political fences, New Detroit made sure that its leadership represented business leaders, church leaders, university officials, community organizations, city unions, and even black militants. Indeed, on August 1, 1967, when New Detroit announced who would sit on its leadership committee, department store owner J. L. Hudson proudly proclaimed that he was “determined to include aggressive grassroots Negro leadership”; ultimately, “three of nine Negro members proudly acknowledged the label of militant.”14

The New Detroit Committee, July 1967. Front row, left to right: The Very Reverend Malcolm Carron, James B. Ogden, Walker L. Cisler, Jean Washington, Joseph L. Hudson Jr., Damon Keith, Lorenzo Freeman, and Mrs. Lena Bivens. Second row, left to right: Max M. Fisher, Arthur Johnson, Virgil E. Boyd, John S. Pingel, Paul M. Borman, John W. Armstrong, Jack Wood, and William T. Gossett. Third row, left to right: Delos Hamlin, Emil Lockwood, Robert Tindal, and Ed Carey. Back row, left to right: Curtis Potter, Ralph T. McElvenny, Norvel Harrington, William M. Day, James M. Roche, Allen Merrell, William Ryan, and the Reverend Robert Potts. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Immediately after forming, New Detroit created five task forces that, by January 1968, had increased to eight: law, communications, community services, youth, recreation and cultural affairs, economic development, employment, education, and housing.15 Each of these New Detroit subgroups had the potential to embroil the entire organization in community conflict. But, as it outlined which problems each task force would tackle, New Detroit made it clear that it cared little what Detroit’s conservative white community thought. New Detroit not only went on record as a strong supporter of open housing, but it even charged that “the current procrastination in enacting adequate legislation in this field is a reflection of the apathy in the white community towards racial justice for all citizens.”16 Like the civil rights liberals who brought the Cavanagh administration to power in 1961, New Detroit leaders also made their intolerance of white racial conservatism clear. According to New Detroit leaders, “fundamental progress on the attack on racism must be made on a regional basis in the white community and from within the white community [because] it is this group—much more than lack of money or of trained personnel or workable processes—that effectively prevents the resolution of this national crisis.”17

New Detroit publicly censured white racism and openly rewarded those in Detroit who were working in biracial community groups, as well as those in primarily African American neighborhood groups whose politics were far to its left. Of those militant leftist organizations, for example, the Federation for Self-determination received a $100,000 matching-funds grant for a forty-two-month period. Clearly, New Detroit was far more worried about alienating black radicals than white conservatives in its attempts to reconstruct the postrebellion city. The overwhelmingly white liberal leadership of New Detroit still believed that if average poor and working-class African Americans believed that tangible progress was being made by city leaders, they would ultimately reject black nationalism. And because it considered white conservatives only a fringe element, New Detroit believed that if black faith could be restored, peace would return and liberal leadership would be secure.

Although perhaps a bit too optimistic about its agenda, New Detroit certainly was prescient about what lie ahead for the city if its social and economic intervention failed. Just as New Detroit began attempting to restore community faith in the leadership of Cavanagh liberals, new incidents of severe police brutality seriously undermined its efforts to avert even greater crisis. Such an incident of police aggression took place on March 29, 1968, when members of a black group called the Republic of New Africa (RNA) were holding a meeting at a Detroit church. This meeting of 250 adults and numbers of children was in progress when the Detroit Police Department (DPD) raided the building shortly before midnight. According to the janitor of the New Bethel Church, who was not a member of the RNA, a police squad car had “stopped suddenly in front of the church’s main entrance. A police officer emerged and as soon as he reached the curb of the sidewalk he fired at the church door with a rifle resembling a pump gun.”18 According to another non-RNA eyewitness, a Miss Keyes, “There were repeated volleys of gunfire discharged by policemen into the church.” Keyes and her friend Miss Huey, both of whom lived in apartments across the street, heard police shout repeatedly, “Come out you B-M-F’s, come out!”19

According to the church janitor, the police then stormed the sanctuary, at which point “occupants of the church lobby, and those still in the nave of the church, scattered in all directions. Some crawled under church pews.”20 While this witness at no time observed shooting by any members of the RNA, he did “observe one white officer deliberately shoot a negro male with hands aloft who had moved too slowly in response to orders.”21 After this shooting, the janitor reported that the police went on a rampage “ripping beads from around the necks of those who wore them and near choking people. One person carrying a green bible was berated, the abuse seemed to center around the bible in some way.”22

Even though security officers for the RNA had searched everyone for weapons who came to this meeting, as was the organization’s policy, in the melee that night one DPD officer was killed and another was severely injured. According to Police Commissioner Johannes Spreen’s account, at 11:42 p.m., two police officers from the Tenth Precinct, Richard Worobec and Michael Czapski, drove by the church where they “observed a group of persons, some of whom were armed with rifles.” These officers stopped to investigate and called for backup, and when they decided to enter the church, they “met with a hail of gunfire.” In the wake of this shooting, police officers corralled 142 men, women, and children in the middle of the night and took them downtown to police headquarters.23

This massive roundup, and the numerous arrests that accompanied it, outraged poor as well as working-class blacks, as it did middle-class leaders from both the white and black community. On the night of the arrests, a particularly incensed black civil rights activist, George Crockett Jr., who by the 1960s was a Recorder’s Court judge, went down to the city jail and held bond hearings until the early hours of the morning.24 Not surprisingly, Crockett’s judicial activism brought on the wrath of the DPD. Within days, DPD officers began circulating a “petition of impeachment and/or removal of Judge Crockett, Jr. from the Recorder’s Court of the City of Detroit.”25 This police response, and the amount of encouragement that officers received from conservative whites who signed the petition, did not surprise Crockett,26 but it greatly upset white liberals such as Richard Marks, who felt compelled to respond. Marks maintained that “whether willing or not, the Detroit Police Officer’s Association [DPOA] approach has pressed our community’s political system to the limit, usurping the way in which no responsible leadership would permit.”27

Indeed, liberal officials in Detroit were so horrified by what had transpired at the New Bethel Church that the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (CCR) immediately drew up and circulated a memo about this event. A CCR official drafted the memo to individual UAW leaders and others, “as one of the persons in this community around which I believe a ‘new partnership’ must be built, I hope that you will give this memorandum on the New Bethel incident your close attention.”28 In this memo, the CCR suggested that “the entire episode is a tragedy of individual and monumental social dimension,” and that it was “part of the inheritance of the ghetto rebellion in the summer of ’67 in which issues of community policy and response were never properly resolved.”29 But while the CCR conceded that “it must be frankly admitted that we have not achieved racial or community change in substance,”30 it did not advocate substantive policy or strategy changes. Instead the CCR focused on how best to deal with the issue of the DPOA petition to recall Judge Crockett. Ultimately it set up the Committee to Honor Judge Crockett in Support of Law and Justice, which was endorsed by Democratic senators, representatives, UAW leaders, and other civic agencies of the Cavanagh administration. This committee immediately began holding brunches, making bumper stickers, and speaking publicly about the need to keep Crockett on the bench.31 Feeling vindicated when they eventually thwarted the effort to remove Crockett, with little introspection the Cavanagh liberals in the city continued their existing efforts to rein in the police officers who kept bringing Detroit to the brink of disaster.

Two months after the New Bethel incident, liberals had the perfect opportunity to assess just how effective their efforts with the police were. The Midwest contingent of the Poor People’s Movement had decided to come to Motown. Unlike Chicago politicians, the Cavanagh administration welcomed these demonstrators to Detroit.32 City officials happily granted permits for movement members to hold a rally at downtown Cobo Hall and then called on the DPD to make sure that everything ran smoothly.

On May 13, 1968, civil rights activists from both the black and white community converged on Cobo Hall to hold a massive rally for jobs and racial justice. Before this event, coordinators from the Poor People’s Movement had met on May 11 to make sure that marchers would be well-organized and that marshals would be well-trained, so that the event would be peaceful.33 On the day of the planned march and rally, hundreds of Detroiters were congregating outside of Cobo Hall when, all of the sudden, the mounted police of the DPD charged the crowd, and complete chaos ensued. As Sam J. Dennis, a field representative of the U.S. Department of Justice who was attending this event, reported, “I saw police officers ride horses into a crowd which I judged to be under control. In addition, I saw officers strike individuals in that crowd with their night sticks.”34 Another official observer of the Cobo Hall riot said, “the actions of the horsemen on the crowd were, in my judgment, uncalled for. The crowd was just standing there observing, walking in and walking out. I observed no provocation on the part of the marchers, marshals, or the crowd for officers to behave in that manner. As the crowd of people sought refuge inside Cobo Hall, foot patrolmen quickly seized and manhandled them inside the building.”35

The numbers of Detroit community residents injured during the Cobo Hall incident once again sent shock waves through the city. The Detroit office of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wrote to the mayor that “never before to our knowledge has an act of such blatant abuse of police power been witnessed by so many unimpeachable eyewitnesses.”36 White progressive groups also launched a public protest against the events at Cobo Hall. As one organization stated, “we, as concerned white people in the metropolitan area of Detroit; strongly protest the brutality of the Detroit Police Department. It is precisely that kind of unwarranted violence, as evidenced on 13 May 1968 upon the Poor People Campaign, which creates suspicion and hatred of police.”37 Finally, groups of blacks and whites together protested the Cobo Hall police attack by filing a lawsuit against the mayor, the police commissioner, and the Wayne County prosecutor, among others. According to the litigants, once the event at Cobo Hall had faded from the headlines, the named defendants “refused or failed to discipline or remove from office those policemen whose manifest bigotry and brutality make them unfit to serve as preservers of the public peace.”38 But despite this suit, and the other expressions of public anger, liberal leaders still did not alter their strategy for dealing with police-community relations. This lack of a new direction not only stunned many black and white Detroiters, but it also fueled a growing feeling among some of them that more radical strategies were now an imperative.

This sentiment was only exacerbated by the fact that, immediately after the 1967 rebellion, there occurred an extraordinary number of incidents of police brutality in Detroit’s school system. From their dealings with schools before 1967, liberal civic leaders knew that “there is a general alienation within the school system between faculty and administration, student body and administration, faculty and community.” They also knew that “this alienation is particularly acute in all black and mixed communities.”39 What they did not appreciate, however, was the fact that the DPD would turn an already bad situation in city schools far worse.

Take an event at Cooley High School on September 19, 1969. Arriving at Cooley armed with bricks, beer bottles, and beer cans, numbers of white students began shouting racial epithets at the black students who composed only about 20 percent of the high school population. These students soon felt under siege as white teenagers shouted, “get out of our school Nigger! All you shitty bastards!” and threatened “you’re gonna get it Niggers. . . [S]hitty bastards go back to the plantations where you belong. . . . [Y]ou Niggers aint gonna stay in our school.”40 White adults, “seen in three pickup trucks with cardboard KKK signs taped on,” were also at Cooley that day, egging the white students on.41

In the midst of this racial attack, someone at Cooley called the police to put an end to the white aggression. But no white students were ever arrested, and it was the black students who experienced the DPD’s wrath. The following accounts detail the horrors endured by black eleventh and twelfth graders at Cooley High.

Here is Deborah Bailey’s account:

I was proceeding down the second floor corridor stairwell when approximately 45 officers rushed up the stairs holding baseball bats and ax handles. . . . I saw them beating Willie Jones. He was hand cuffed. They drug him out of a car. They beat him outside and they beat him against the wall. They beat him going outside of the building and while inside the building. . . . Then, about 5 or 10 minutes later, they brought Reed Anderson in. He was handcuffed. Blood was coming from everywhere. All around. I couldn’t take too much more. I was shaking all over. Blood looked like it was coming from his eyes, his nose, everywhere.

Here is Willie Jones’s account:

There was a problem outside of the school between black students and white students and police officers. . . . White students were around the driveway with their chains and bats screaming “whiteys get those Niggers. . . . The policemen drug me out and threw me into the wall head first. . . . I hit the wall and bounced back and he threw me in again. . . . I hit the wall three times head first. Then I fell. The police officers kicked me and elbowed me and stepped on me. Two officers came and helped me up; one officer hit me a couple more times. . . . I saw Reed complaining about the loss of blood to his hands with wire cuffs. There was this real short officer telling Reed to shut up. He said “we can do better than this, you Niggers.” . . . [T]his one officer was walking around with a bat saying, “I got this Nigger’s blood all over me.” . . . [H]e was smiling and looking real happy about it. I started to take my jacket off so I could press it against Reed’s head. The police officer hit me across my stomach and chest with an ax handle. . . . I had a fractured skull, a slight concussion, a broken hip bone and shoulder bones.42

These egregious cases of police brutality were not unique. Conflicts between police and students also were reported at both elementary and junior high schools.43

Having netted success in their efforts to reform the police department in 1969, civic liberals turned to the electoral arena hoping that activism there would dissipate the deepening crisis in the Motor City. As the 1969 mayoral election neared, the city’s white liberal leaders, clearly influenced by the city’s black middle-class, pinned their hopes on a political newcomer, Richard Austin, to heal Detroit’s wounds. As the Detroit News saw it, “this may well be one of the crucial elections in the city’s history.”44

Austin was a migrant from Alabama who had become Michigan’s first black certified public accountant as well as the first black auditor of Wayne County. Austin was a well-respected member of the black middle class, but what is more important, he was a moderate liberal whom white administration liberals hoped would defeat white candidate Roman Gribbs, a former prosecutor and then a leader in law enforcement who played continually on white fears of black “criminality” and “dependency.” Indeed, Gribbs “promised an all-out fight against crime in the streets,” and he also advocated bringing police councilors into public schools.45 When Gribbs suggested the creation of “small units of police with crime-fighting responsibility assigned to certain neighborhoods,” city liberals, both black and white, feared that this would only increase hostility between police and inner-city residents. Allegedly, as an assistant prosecutor for the city, Gribbs had actually tried to “keep Negroes off of the jury,” which indicated to them that it would most likely be blacks targeted in any crime crackdown that he proposed.46

Adding to the alarm of both white and black liberals, and only confirming their support of Austin, was the entrance of write-in candidate Mary Beck, whose earlier recall effort against Cavanagh and her promise that as mayor she would be “getting tough on crime” made her even more threatening than Gribbs. As an ad for Beck’s campaign maintained, “only the Communists can benefit by destroying our society through permissiveness or lawlessness.”47

Austin’s willingness to tackle the dicey issue of police-community relations, and ultimately his advocacy of “civilian control of police and all other city departments,” indeed made him popular with both discontented city blacks and white progressives, who still had not come up with any leadership alternatives to the disappointing Democratic party.48 And yet such views simultaneously drew the ire of Detroit’s conservative whites, who firmly believed that the new mayor should grant more, not less, power to the police. If elected, either Gribbs or Beck would do just that. Much to the surprised delight of his supporters, however, Austin won the mayoral primary on September 9, 1969, with 45,856 votes to Gribbs’s 34,650 and Beck’s 26,480.

Despite Austin’s victory, however, the tremendous voter support for Beck indicated that many whites in the city were even more conservative than Gribbs, a potential obstacle to Austin in the upcoming November election. As the Detroit News put it, Beck “apparently still is the darling of conservative homeowners,” and she recently “accepted enthusiastically the support of the right-wing youth group that had backed former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace for president in 1968.” The problem for the Austin campaign was that even though, as author B. J. Widick points out, Gribbs was “not a ‘Wallace man’; he didn’t need to be. As a sheriff he automatically symbolized ‘law and order.’”49 The fear was that Beck’s supporters easily would swing into his camp after the primary. As Austin’s supporters well knew, the city’s most conservative whites would never support their man now that Beck was out of the race. As one such conservative white voter had written to Austin before the election, “Your BLACKNESS is the only reason all those BLACK APES voted in the primaries! . . . All you BLACKS know how to do is have illegitimate children, drink, tear up schools, rob, rape, and constantly expect to get handouts from tax-paying whites! If by any fluke you become mayor of Detroit, you will be mayor of a dung heap because any WHITE who is able to do so will move out.”50

But Detroit was saved, temporarily, from this threatened exodus because, on November 4, 1969, in what scholars have deemed the “closest political contest in the city’s history,”51 Gribbs became mayor of Detroit with 257,312 votes to Austin’s 250,000.52 And yet if conservative white Detroiters had hoped that the ousting of a liberal mayor with civil rights sympathies would restore the racial status quo or discourage black activism, the events that unfolded between 1969 and 1971 left them sorely disappointed. Gribbs’s victory did not spell the end of social welfare and civil rights-sympathetic liberalism in Detroit, particularly because black and white progressives had managed to retain all six liberal incumbents and add three new liberals (including a third African American) to the City Council.53 Gribbs’s victory also did not quell the radical critics in the African American community. In fact, the combination of Gribbs’ pro–law enforcement platform and Austin’s defeat not only led poor and working-class blacks to become even more politically active, but it made them far more radical than Austin had ever been. While Cavanagh himself was pleased that the “almost demagogic” Beck had not won, even he was unprepared for the political fall out of Austin’s defeat.54

After the Gribbs election, a full-fledged grassroots black revolutionary challenge to the existing racial inequities in the city came of age. After 1969, a key African American minority in both the city and the auto plants set about creating numerous militant organizations that advocated far more radical avenues for effecting change than Great Society-style liberals were willing to embrace and conservatives were willing to tolerate. As Detroit Scope Magazine reported in May 1968, “if anything, the conflict is in a more advanced state than it was in late July 1967,” because “New Detroit’s greatest grass-roots failure has been its inability to win support from the black militants.”55

After November 1969, black militants became determined to lead the Motor City forward on their terms. The polarization that Detroit experienced after 1967, by 1969 had generated several new leadership possibilities. Although the first leaders to emerge were revolutionary black nationalists, they were soon joined by radical whites. And, in opposition to the solidification of this biracial Left front, conservative activists began mobilizing to take power in the Motor City as well.

A key reason that the election of Gribbs, even more than the uprising of 1967, had spawned such political factionalism was that in January 1971 the police department, with Mayor Gribbs’s blessing, formed a special undercover unit called “Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets,” or STRESS. STRESS was just what Gribbs had promised his overwhelmingly white constituency—a tougher DPD division targeting crime in the city’s poor neighborhoods. According to the CCR’s Police-Community Relations Committee, the STRESS program “involve[d] one officer acting as a decoy, often disguised as a woman, a drunk or some other likely robbery victim, while two or three officers conceal themselves nearby to protect the decoy officer and to help with the apprehension of criminals.”56 Notably the approximately one hundred officers in STRESS, including between thirty to forty decoy officers, who volunteered for the program, were “often officers known to use excessive force.”57 After the birth of STRESS, the already severely strained relationship between the police and the black community deteriorated further. Between January and September 1971, STRESS made 1,400 arrests, and its officers had killed ten suspects, nine of whom were black. By September 1973, STRESS had a total of twenty-two suspect fatalities to its credit.58 Of those fatalities, 95 percent came from the decoy operations (even though decoy operations comprised only 20 percent of STRESS activities), and six STRESS officers were responsible for the majority of the deaths.59

Almost overnight city blacks came to view STRESS as little more than an all-white, DPD-sanctioned vigilante organization. As more and more African Americans met an ugly fate at the hands of STRESS, such as Clarence Manning Jr., Dallas Collins, James Henderson, Ken Hicks, Howard Moore, Horrace Fennicks, Harold Singleton, Herbert Childress, Donald Saunders and teenagers Ricardo Buck and Craig Mitchell (none of whose deaths at the hands of STRESS were investigated in a manner satisfactory to the victims’ families) the tensions between city blacks and the DPD reached an all-time high. With STRESS, black citizens’ faith in the strategies of the established civil rights leadership, or liberal organizations like the CCR, was irreparably breached.

Sensing black Detroiters’ outrage and discouragement, African American radicals met many times after the 1967 rebellion to decide how best to provide coherent alternatives to the policies of white and black liberals. These young radicals, several of whom had been migrants from the South—among them John Williams from Louisiana, Luke Tripp from Tennessee, and Mike Hamlin from Mississippi60—had been civil rights activists in the South and Detroit, had participated in Detroit study groups run by old leftists, and had taken courses at Wayne State University (WSU). Scholar James Geshwender notes that these activists “read Marx and Lenin; but they also read Mao-Tse-Tung, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Che Guevara among many others. They [also] became acquainted with various black and white radicals in and around Detroit . . . [and] in every case they read and/or listened with a critical orientation.”61 As Detroiter Ron Lockett remembers, “Wayne [state] was so incredibly fertile. There were the cultural nationalists, the nationalists who embraced socialism, the Marxist-Leninists, the Communists. It was just an incredible time.”62

Inspired by their political education, young black radicals in Detroit decided to take their knowledge and new political perspective to the growing number of community blacks who were no longer sure that liberals could respond satisfactorily to their grievances.63 One way to do this most effectively, they decided, was to start their own city newspaper to report on and analyze the current racial and political situation in the city as well as to map out a program of urban revolution for the “masses.” In October 1967, the Inner City Voice hit the streets. Its masthead, “Detroit’s Black Community Newspaper” and “The Voice of the Revolution,” made it clear that this was not just any city paper. Its stated purpose was “to be a positive response to The Great Rebellion, elaborating, clarifying, and articulating what was already in the streets,”64 as well as to be “a vehicle for political organization, education, and change.”65 Around the paper’s editors a revolutionary and black nationalist Left began to gravitate and grow. Black radicals associated with the Inner City Voice soon became involved in virtually every move for social and political change in the city.

By 1968, the Inner City Voice was truly a community-oriented paper, albeit a most radical one. It reported on events such as the outrageous acquittals of police officers who were charged with murdering black teenagers at the Algiers Motel during the 1967 uprising, and it also followed the activities of black middle-class liberals in city politics while exposing any weakness or perceived hypocrisy among them.66 The paper routinely reprinted statements from Detroit’s other left-leaning community organizations that were also critical of liberal plans for the city. In addition, the paper chronicled the continuing incidents of white violence in high schools and repeatedly offered examples of how other revolutionary freedom fighters around the world had handled their similarly oppressive conditions.67

When Austin lost his bid for mayor in 1969, the disenchantment that initially prompted black radicals to publish the Inner City Voice escalated dramatically. The editors of the paper quickly stepped up distribution efforts and suggested to their readers that Austin’s defeat was actually not a bad thing. In the November 1969 issue, the paper’s editors argued that “Austin represented the most backward, right-wing, conservative wing of ‘Negro’ leadership in the city.”68

After 1969, the black nationalists affiliated with the Inner City Voice started Black Star Press, so that all persons and organizations considered too left by mainstream printing houses could be published. They also started a production company called Black Star Productions, which, in 1970, came out with a full-length documentary on the black revolutionary struggle in Detroit, Finally Got the News.69 Also in 1969, the black radicals affiliated with the Inner City Voice staged a takeover of the WSU student newspaper, the South End. According to one of these black radicals, Marian Kramer, the refusal of local presses to print the Inner City Voice planted the idea of commandeering the South End so that they could “continue to get the word out concerning the situation in the plants, the communities, and the students in the inner city of Detroit.”70

In 1968, WSU had 68.9 percent of all the black students attending the three biggest universities in the state.71 If educating greater numbers of black Detroiters was the goal, then reaching WSU’s large working and commuter student body made sense. When Inner City Voice staffer John Watson ran for the position of editor at the South End and won, his editorial team announced that the South End would be overhauled completely with the “intention of promoting the interests of the impoverished, oppressed, exploited, and powerless victims of white monopoly capitalism and imperialism.”72 They went on to note that this paper also would “present that portion of the news which rarely receives coverage.”73 Like their counterparts at the Inner City Voice, the South End's writers often went beyond news reporting to offer an education in black revolution. Also like the Inner City Voice, the South End routinely editorialized on the dangers of black middle-class “Toms,” “honkie students,” “frat freaks,” “racist fat asses,” and “pigs” alike.74 The language of the black radicals was not pretty, but this, too, was deliberate. These revolutionary activists in Detroit were determined to “tell it like it is,” unlike the liberals whom they felt too often glossed over the Motor City’s ugliest elements.

While some black radicals were attempting to tap into and redirect black disaffection in Detroit through the press and visual media, others chose the pulpit. That there now were blacks willing to question traditional doctrinal conventions, reject mainstream theological explanations for their condition, and consider a new revolutionary black theology first became apparent after the 1967 rebellion. Just hours after that uprising began, a stone statue of Christ that stood in front of the city’s Sacred Heart Seminary was mysteriously painted over in black. According to the Detroit Free Press, “three men tried to whitewash the statue several weeks after the rebellion but they were shooed away by a black woman who lived in the area. Someone came back later to finish the job and the statue went through several paintings in the weeks following the riot.”75 By 1967, even the religious icons of the city had been both racialized and imbued with political significance.

Like many other African Americans across the U.S. when the National Committee of Negro Churchmen called for the development of a theology relevant to the “Black revolution,” black Detroiters responded to this call.76 In fact, Detroit became the site of some of the country’s most dramatic struggles over black theology. While it is well known that Detroit was the birthplace of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s and a hotbed of Muslim activism in the late 1960s, with Malcolm X as a regular visitor and speaker, few recognize that the city also was home to the country’s most serious black Christian challenge to religious as well as political accommodation and moderation.77 In 1967, Detroit’s Reverend Albert Cleage gained national attention when he founded the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a place of worship that “attracted more persons committed to Black Power than any single institution still connected to the Christian churches.”78 Cleage also pioneered a new religious doctrine for the black community that influenced African Americans across the country. In a series of dramatic sermons published in The Black Messiah (1969),79 Cleage argued that Jesus was a black revolutionary, that the Promised Land could be reached only through grassroots struggle, and that the Scribes and the Pharisees were just like “the established Uncle Toms who were profiting from the system of oppression.”80 After 1969, Cleage wielded increasing of power in Detroit. Even the city’s more traditional black ministers had to concede that he “produced a political theory that has shaped Detroit in the 1970s.”81

Cleage did not just reinterpret the Bible. He spoke to his parishioners routinely about various controversial events in the city and called on them to take a revolutionary approach to registering their concerns. Cleage knew that “the Black Church must recapture the loyalty of the black youth if it is to be significant in the Black Revolution,” and he intended to do just that. One of his sermons, “An Epistle to Stokley,”82 maintained that “like today’s young black prophets,” Jesus was “a dangerous revolutionary,”83 and that even Jesus recognized that “conflict and violence are inevitable.”84 Referring specifically to the key struggles for equality still being waged in Detroit, Cleage argued that “conflict is inevitable unless the white man agrees to transfer power.”85

That the rebellion of 1967, and the mayoral election of 1969, spawned a revolutionary black press, media, and theology was clearly an important turning point in the political history of the Motor City. But these black revolutionaries might have been confined to preaching to the converted had they not also begun to mobilize within the community around issues relevant to both poor and working-class blacks. After 1969, Detroit’s black Left self-consciously involved itself in virtually every community action designed to reform education, economics, or the police. As a result, it soon was a very potent political force for every Detroiter to reckon with.86

Of course, disaffected Detroiters had already been mobilizing in radical ways even before the black revolutionaries took up their cause. For example, both black and white teachers in the Detroit public school system had long complained of the poor educational resources in the black schools and routinely protested these shortages. Some teachers, such as Lynn Konstat, were not shy to call attention to the paucity of materials available to students such as those at Cooley High School. As she noted, the twelfth-grade English book there had been printed in 1939 and it had only one black author in it.87 And by 1968 teachers had also begun to demand action, not just attention, from the School Board. One group of black educators in Detroit issued a “Declaration of Black Teachers,” which insisted on concrete changes to “the present system of education [that] is not organized for the benefit of black youth.” It recommitted black teachers to the process of lifting black students “from the hell of ignorance, confusion and despair in which racist society has placed them.”88 Black students around Detroit had been taking matters into their own hands even more boldly than were their teachers. On October 18, 1968, black students at McKenzie High School staged a walkout during which they demanded more black teachers and a more Afro-centric curriculum, among other things. Then, on October 25, 1969, black students from Cooley High marched to the School Center Building, where they demanded a meeting with Superintendent Norman Drachler as well as immediate satisfaction for their demands, which mirrored those of the students at McKenzie. Meanwhile, student leaders from ten other high schools and one junior high had been holding regular meetings to determine what their more radical strategy would include for overhauling the educational system.89

In response to such escaling black discontent on July 1, 1969, Abe Zwerdling, the liberal president of Detroit’s School Board, suggested that “the state Legislature redraw all the school boundaries in the Detroit area to create five or six new school systems, completely integrated.”90 Contrary to the hopes of Zwerdling, the Cavanagh administration, and the black middle class, this new strategy did not bring peace to Detroit schools but touched off a firestorm of protest. Indeed the combination of preexisting teacher-student militancy in the black community, as well as the deep citywide dissatisfaction with the liberal proposal to decentralize and desegregate the city’s schools, offered black revolutionaries the perfect opportunity to step in and provide leadership, advice, and support.

As the liberal School Board saw it, black “extremist groups” were soon exploiting the “school situations to recruit membership, sell their ideas and eventually replace the present system and institutions with their own.”91 This view was not far off the mark. As soon as Detroit’s School Board suggested its decentralization plan, twenty-five black community groups came together to form an umbrella organization called Parents and Students for Community Control (PASCC). And, from PASCC’s inception, black radicals from the Inner City Voice, the South End, and the black clergy played a key leadership role. Indeed, it was their hard work that brought these groups together in the first place.

Guided by black radicals, PASCC not only rejected the School Board’s plan, but it also proposed one of its own, the Black Plan, which “would divide the school system into eight districts, six of which would be in a black controlled and nonracist school board.”92 The parents in PASCC made it clear that they wanted their children to be educated by teachers and overseen by administrators, with whom they could identify and trust. The June 1970 issue of the Inner City Voice reprinted an open letter from PASCC, which had been drafted with the help of Inner City Voice editors. According to this letter, “control of education in the black community by reactionary middle class whites had no right to exist. . . . To leave the education of Black children in the hands of those who have so miserably failed, despite their control over resources, would be suicide. Community Control is education for survival.”93

According to PASCC literature, after 1969, the organization “increasingly began to campaign, to educate the black community. . . . [M]eetings and rallies were called; literature was distributed, [and] PASCC spokesmen appeared at over 100 community meetings.”94 PASCC’s goal was to develop proposals for the School Board’s new decentralization guidelines, which would give the black community more power and would make sure that enough of the city’s school budget went to the mostly black schools. The Black Plan incorporated these objectives. Because the existing Board of Education, one that PASCC members reviled for being “controlled by white liberals,”95 wanted total integration, it found the Black Plan unacceptable. PASCC members felt it particularly ironic that the board had taken sixteen years after the legal mandate for desegregation to make this decentralization move intended to facilitate integration. They decided that it was the whites’ “method for maintaining control in the city.”96

In fact, white liberals had always supported the principle of integrated education, but only now had they been forced to think of new ways that they might accomplish it. The fear of losing the votes of conservative whites, which had prevented city liberals from being aggressive on the school integration issue before, now was being overshadowed by their fear of losing control of the schools to black radicals. Ironically, only a few years earlier, most PASCC parents would have fully supported the liberals’ integration plan. The fact that they came to reject it so vehemently is evidence of just how disillusioned they had become with liberal coalition politics.

On April 7, 1970, when the Detroit School Board formally adopted its original plan to integrate city schools, many community blacks were furious. For them, according to PASCC, “the Board’s plan was one of the worst in terms of black control.” As far as PASCC was concerned, the board’s plan actually fueled white racial violence.97 PASCC members were outraged to report that after the board’s plan went into effect, “mobs of white students and their parents brutally attacked the small groups of blacks who had punitively been sent to the white schools.”98

After the failure of their Black Plan, and again with the guidance of black revolutionaries such as Inner City Voice staffer Mike Hamlin, PASCC became even more radical. Not only did it continue to run candidates against members of the Detroit Board of Education (receiving upwards of 70,000 votes),99 but it also began agitating in the schools directly through a separate but closely linked group called the Black Student United Front (BSUF). The BSUF was the brainchild of Hamlin and other black leftists who recently had come together to create a formidable black revolutionary umbrella organization called the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, or “the League.” Soon the BSUF had branches in twenty-two high schools, each of which demanded the removal of police from the schools and the end of all-white curricula and predominately white faculties. At Osborn High School, where, according to the BSUF, “roving packs of white adults and white Osborn students charged a group of about 100 black students . . . [throwing] bottles, pieces of metal, and various deadly objects at the black students,”100 BSUF leaders submitted twelve demands to the school administration, including that it add twenty more black instructors and a Black Studies curriculum.101 The BSUF at Northeastern Senior High demanded that “supplements to the current textbooks must be added that include today’s social problems and current politics like Black Rage, The Rich and the Super Rich, and Soul on Ice.102 And at Northern High, members of the BSUF demanded that “all pictures and artifacts in Northern be directly in line with the percentage of black students . . . that the Black nationalist flag of unity be displayed . . . that the library of Northern High be filled with an abundance of books dealing with the Black Experience . . . that a room in Northern be set aside and named the Malcolm X Reading Room . . . [and] that Northern be renamed Rap Brown High.”103

As black students, led by black revolutionaries, were voicing their increasingly radical demands throughout the school system, city liberals panicked. The educational committee of New Detroit, as well as the CCR and the Detroit Public Schools Commission on Community Relations (DP-SCCR), each began working overtime to conduct interviews and take surveys to figure out what was going on. When students at Northern High School launched a protest that made headlines as the “Northern High Revolt of 1969,” the liberals’ fear that they were losing control of the situation only intensified. The increasing unease of white liberals was mirrored in the black civil rights leadership. In earlier years, the NAACP had been willing to support the social activism of students in city schools, and the local NAACP had even issued a press statement on April 22, 1966, that “it support[ed] the Northern High School students” in their efforts to end discrimination.104 After the Northern High Revolt of 1969, however, and after black students at Central High School wrote a vitriolic attack on the relationship between middle-class blacks and white officials in City Hall, civil rights leaders distanced themselves from all student activism.105

If the revolutionary black nationalist activism in the educational arena threatened the politics of liberalism, so did its mobilization around questions of economic justice. The black nationalist theologians, with the support of black radicals from the Inner City Voice and the League, once again turned revolutionary rhetoric into action when they hosted a national meeting of civil rights activists called the Black Economic Development Conference (BEDC) on April 26, 1969. The BEDC brought together black radicals from around the country, including the director of international affairs for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, James Foreman. The BEDC made national news when Foreman proposed the adoption of a highly controversial “Black Manifesto,” a scathing attack on the “hypocrisy” of “the white man’s religion” and of all churches, black and white, that followed the doctrine. This document, written in dramatic language, not only outlined the elements of Christianity that “excused oppression,” but it also called for $500 million in reparations from white churches and synagogues to be used for economic development in the black community.106 Significantly, this manifesto was ratified by a vote of 187 to 63 at the BEDC, and thereafter black churches were split wide open over the question of how politics and religion should, or should not, intersect. The Black Manifesto’s call for concrete and immediate action to eliminate inequality—combined with the growth of the Nation of Islam, the new militant theology of Reverend Cleage, and the radical theology espoused by prominent black intellectuals nationally107—meant that many blacks were now determined to take economic justice rather than ask for it.

James Foreman speaking at Black Economic Development Conference, December 3, 1969. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

In addition to the black radical theologians as well as Inner City Voice staffers and League leaders, soon a Detroit branch of the Black Panther party was engaging in militant economic activism. According to the DPD, in 1970 “there [were] only about 25 hard core Panther members in Detroit with another 50 sympathizers serving as community workers.”108 But the police also conceded that their estimate might not be accurate. And even if there were few actual Panther members in the city, Joe Dulin, the principal at St. Martin de Porres black Catholic High School in Detroit, warned that “if things don’t change soon every eleven and twelve year old will end up a Black Panther. Potentially every black is a Panther.”109 The Detroit Panthers were particularly active in the arena that made the greatest difference to black residents: economic justice in their neighborhoods. According to Nadine Brown at the mainstream black newspaper the Michigan Chronicle, “The Panthers get food donations from all merchants in the community . . . [and] if they refuse, they tell them that they are not going to be allowed to stay in the community if they don’t put something back into it.”110 Even though they sometimes accomplished their goals through threat and intimidation, the Panthers won a degree of respect in Detroit’s black community because they operated programs to feed poor children and educate citizens of their rights under the law.111

By 1969, radical activism to eliminate economic and racial inequality in the Motor City was not engaged in solely by male revolutionaries. Black female revolutionaries were also extremely active in Detroit. Some mobilized poor women in the community to demand better treatment and services from the welfare system, or they urged working-class women to demand more humane treatment on the job in the city’s health care industry. Black women also worked in groups, such as the West Central Organization, to save neighborhoods threatened by urban-renewal initiatives. As African American radical Marian Kramer remembers, “we were not the typical women in the NOW movement. . . . We were always in the streets, fighting urban renewal, forming tenants’ unions, protecting people against police brutality, and so forth.”112

While the post-1969 escalation of such revolutionary black activism in Detroit deeply disturbed liberals and conservatives alike, what most alarmed them was the fact that, increasingly, black radicals were not working alone. As community opposition to STRESS in particular mounted, black men and women from the Inner City Voice, the South End, the Panthers, and the religious community found themselves closely allied with a growing number of white revolutionaries. Indeed, it was the broad-based nature of anti-STRESS activism in the Motor City after 1971 that most transformed the city’s black radical challenge to liberalism and conservatism into a biracial revolutionary challenge.

Detroit activist Marian Kramer. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

From the moment that the DPD formed STRESS, it was obvious that city blacks were most upset that this tiny unit was responsible for 39 percent of the DPD’s citizen deaths during its first year of operation. But STRESS officer behavior soon generated much white criticism as well. Indeed the high numbers of questionable deaths made the DPD “the department with the highest number of civilian deaths per capita in the country,”113 and this was hard for any Detroiter to ignore. In 1971 Chief Inspector James Bannon of the DPD actually admitted to the Michigan Civil Rights Commission that thirteen STRESS officers already had been cited by the Citizen Injury Board at least two times: “Five officers had between five and eight contacts [with the board], and Officer Peterson was reported with 22 contacts, 21 one of which occurred prior to his STRESS assignment.”114

The crowd at the March 26, 1922, anti-STRESS rally. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Ultimately the police brutality witnessed during the New Bethel incident, the Cobo Hall incident, and that which was perpetrated by STRESS led local whites to the left, just as it had led blacks. Some of these whites formed radical organizations such as the Ad Hoc Coalition and People against Racism (PAR) specifically to address racial discrimination in the Motor City. The Ad Hoc Coalition was formed by white Detroiters such as Sheila Murphy, whose family long had been active in the city’s Catholic Workers Movement.115 Likewise, the white Detroiters who organized PAR in 1968 had long been involved in civic civil rights initiatives in the city.

It is significant, however, that local white radicals were soon joined by other whites from around the country who were convinced that the racial and political polarization in the Motor City suggested significant revolutionary possibility. Believing that Detroit was ripe for revolution, groups broadly identified as “New Leftists,” “Trotskeyists,” “Socialists,” “Communists,” and “Maoists” began leafleting and selling papers in the city after the 1967 rebellion. Organizations such as the International Socialists, the Revolutionary Communist party, and the Socialist Workers party, to name but a few, formed Detroit branches after 1967 and soon began mobilizing in both the community and the auto plants. As scholar Robert Mast writes, “In the 1960s and early 1970s a number of progressive-minded whites came to Detroit to join with native-born white Detroiters; they wanted to mold a political moment, in cooperation with Black progressives. . . . Detroit would be one of the opening shots in a protracted war with the holders of power—maybe the Fort Sumter of the late twentieth-century People’s Movement.”116 This is exactly what white radical Jim Jacobs thought when he moved to Detroit in 1968. As he saw it, “this is a city where the black liberation struggle was an objective reality.”117 Likewise white radical Rick Feldman moved to the Motor City in 1970 because “we were going to make the revolution in Detroit. We were welcomed and challenged and criticized by everybody who was here before us.”118 White radical Dave Riddle also was a part of that generation who saw Detroit as a very significant place: “We looked at it as a labor center and a center of the movement for black liberation.”119

White radicals first had the opportunity to work with black radicals in several community organizations, such as the aforementioned West Central Organization (WCO), “an amalgamation of white liberals and activists and poor of all colors . . . with radical Saul Alinsky as tutor.”120 The WCO, an umbrella group “representing 55 churches, block clubs and other organizations,”121 had been around before the 1967 rebellion and convened to make civic urban-renewal efforts more sensitive to the needs of those who would be removed.122 By 1969, however, as the WCO became more embroiled in other civic battles, such as that over school desegregation, it also became far more radical. Indeed, when the WCO decided to place black revolutionary John Watson in charge of its community action efforts, the group attracted numerous city radicals, both white and black.

But while radical whites in Detroit clearly had contact with black radicals before 1971, it was the excesses of STRESS after that year that gave these whites the opportunity to be a genuine part of the black liberation movement. In fact, after STRESS killed teenagers Ricardo Buck and Craig Mitchell, black and white revolutionaries together organized a State of Emergency Committee (SEC), which soon became the coordinator of all anti-STRESS activism in the city. The day after the murders of Buck and Mitchell, for example, the SEC met at the Northland Family Center, where both boys had been employed, and demanded that the mayor disband STRESS immediately. The gathering was attended by virtually every black and white radical in Detroit, as well as middle class black Detroiters such as the editors of the Michigan Chronicle and representatives from the Michigan State Board of Education, the Detroit Branch NAACP, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.123

Such new cooperation between city radicals and black liberals had not escaped the attention of Detroit’s white liberal leaders. Radicals clearly now led the most determined grassroots activism against police brutality, and black liberals supported them at least in this cause. As the CCR noted after the debacle at the New Bethel Church, “the generalized civil rights community (which under ordinary circumstances have little or nothing to do with the people involved in the Republic of New Africa group) [is] rising to the general defense of the right of any group to exist that speaks to the issue of racial and social change in this country and community.”124 It did not surprise the CCR that when the SEC organized an anti-STRESS rally in Kennedy Square, more than 5,000 Detroiters—leftists and black liberals—came there to protest.

The September 23, 1971, anti-STRESS rally. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Because black and white radicals were running the SEC, other community groups and individuals wishing to work with the SEC also became more radical in their activism against STRESS. For example black police officers who had fought against racism within the DPD for years became more outspoken and more radical with a push from the black and white revolutionaries in the SEC. The Black Guardians of Michigan, an all-black organization of police officers, went on record in 1972 demanding that the founder of STRESS, Police Commissioner John Nichols, immediately disband that “‘murder’ squad,” and that if he did not, they would “comply with our obligation to the community by identifying those members of this Gestapo Murder Squad to the public.” These officers also noted publicly that “we, as black officers, feel no more secure in our person than the Jews did under Adolph Hitler.”125

Not surprisingly, the fact that black and white revolutionaries were capturing the loyalties and interest of growing numbers of poor as well as working-class black Detroiters, and that they were advocating a future city based on socialist or communist premises, deeply angered white Detroiters who always had been racially conservative and had only grown more so since the upheaval of 1967. Just as that rebellion had spawned both black and white revolutionary groups seeking to lead Detroit in an entirely new direction, the 1967 uprising had also made the city’s white conservatives increasingly determined to shape Detroit’s destiny.

That a new white conservative movement had been gaining momentum since 1967 became particularly apparent in the city’s educational arena. Just as the liberal School Board’s plan to decentralize and desegregate Detroit’s public schools ignited radical black militancy, it also fueled conservative white activism. In the fall of 1969, when the Detroit School Board held public meetings so that parents could come and register their opinions about the proposed decentralization plan, not only did members of PASCC show up in large numbers, but so did scores of white parents who were also deeply opposed to school integration. Then, on April 7, 1970, when the board announced that its decentralization plan would be implemented, “750 white parents, some carrying picket signs, quickly filled the 250 seats and crowded in hallways.” It amazed the School Board that by the time that the meeting got under way, “hundreds of citizens packed the meeting facilities and the lobbies and halls of the School Center Building. Closed circuit television was set up for those who could not get into the crowded meeting room.”126 And when it became clear that the integration plan would become formal policy in that meeting, despite the fact that several conservative members of the board who were not liberals and had voted against it, white parents were incensed and decided to mobilize against integration on their own.

Over the issue of school decentralization, and specifically mandated busing, numbers of previously moderate whites in Detroit also found themselves gravitating toward the conservative camp. Consequently, longtime racial conservatives found themselves vindicated and energized. Indeed their post-1967 activism indicated clearly that conservative whites were as politically committed and as determined to effect the course of history in the Motor City, as any black or white radical. In 1970, several parents on the East Side, the home of Osborn High School, where PASCC had noted extraordinary white violence against black students, came together to stop the desegregation plan—or at least the busing of children within it. The mothers among them created an organization called North East Mothers Alert (NEMA), and in time this group became one of the most vocal anti-busing groups in the city.127 Before long, parents on the West Side were also mobilizing against busing, and NEMA consolidated with these West Side forces to form Mothers Alert Detroit (MAD).128 MAD was certainly an organization to be reckoned with. It attended School Board meetings, circulated petitions, went to the media with its views, and even picketed the Detroit grocery store chain, Farmer Jack, because the store contributed community service money to the NAACP.129

Detroit woman with “Wallace” and “No Busing” buttons at the Flemming School. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Conservative white Detroiters made their political presence and strength known in the city’s educational arena in other ways as well. On April 7, 1970, when the proposal to decentralize Detroit’s public schools became policy, a controversy erupted after conservatives accused School Board liberals of hatching their plan during a secret and closed meeting on March 31, 1969, and then presenting it as fait accompli at the April 7 gathering. The covert nature of this vital meeting outraged parents of both races, and around the city, 2,200 students boycotted four Detroit schools in protest. White parents such as Aubrey Short went much further than this, however. On May 4, 1970, Short kicked off a petition drive to recall all four of the liberal members of the School Board who had voted for the desegregation plan. By June 1970, Short presented the City Election Commission with more than 130,000 signatures demanding that the issue of recall be put on the ballot. On July 27, 1970, Wayne County Circuit Judge Thomas Roumell ordered the recall off of the ballot because all signatures had not been verified, but the Court of Appeals put it back on the ballot in August. On August 4, 1970, the conservative white community, ironically with the assistance of more than a few black nationalist voters, succeeded in removing all four liberal members from the Detroit School Board.130

While some of Detroit’s conservative whites expressed their views by voting in the School Board referendum, others opted for more extreme actions. Even though these whites should have felt more secure when Gribbs became mayor in 1969, it had not escaped their notice that it had been since Gribbs took office that black and white revolutionary sentiment had flourished, becoming both more popular and powerful. In response, many of these whites began embracing a politics far to the right of Gribbs as the only way to combat the perceived threat. After 1969, the United Klans of America in the Michigan cities of Detroit, Flint, Southgate, Ponitac, Lapeer, Dearborn, Bancroft, and Owosso stepped up their public presence, and KKK Youth Corps leaflets began showing up in inner-city schools. These leaflets called on whites “to organize a fighting corps of white students from your friends and classmates,” and often they set off just the sort of violence that had so brutalized black students at Cooley High in September 1969.131 In addition to supporting the Klan, some of Detroit’s conservative whites gravitated after 1969 toward Donald Lobsinger’s John Birch–like organization, Breakthrough, “which held rallies all over white Detroit. . . . [T]he slogan of Breakthrough was ‘SASO’ standing for ‘Study, Arm, Store Provisions and Organize.’”132 In one such rally at Cobo Hall, in this case to show whites’ support for George Wallace, utter chaos ensued once again when black and white counterprotesters experienced the DPD’s wrath. Writers from the South End described this incident, known as “COBO II”: “As the people fled the clubs and mace, they were pushed and thrown over the ten foot drop to the ground where even more pigs waited to club them. Dozens of people were injured with split heads, broken bones, lacerations, cuts and abrasions.”133

As conservative whites began mobilizing politically, an all-out war for the future of the city was on, and little had inflamed the passions of conservative whites more than the activism of Detroit’s black nationalists. As one white Detroiter responded to the Black Manifesto at the BEDC, “I owe the black man nothing,” while another, a thirty-two-year-old city white, claimed that “the Negro wants to enslave the white man like he was enslaved 100 years ago. They want to take everything away from us.”134 A twenty-four-year-old white woman concurred wholeheartedly. She deeply feared a “Black Takeover—Take Over is the word because that is what they want to do and they will.”135 And finally, yet another white Detroiter argued that “its Brown, Carmichael, and that crowd” who should be blamed for “communism” reaching “the uneducated Colored.”136 Ultimately the most committed conservative whites were willing to go to great lengths to stop the black nationalists. For example, in response to John Watson’s ascendancy to the editorship of the South End, Donald Lobsinger’s organization, Breakthrough, expended a great deal of effort in obtaining more than 2,000 white students’ signatures on a petition demanding that the president of Wayne State University “fire student newspaper editor John Watson.”137

It is important, however, to note that white revolutionaries angered these white conservatives as much as did the black radicals.138 They were slightly heartened by the fact that the Detroit and Michigan State Police contained a “Red Squad,” which had been in existence since the 1930s, but had become particularly active since 1967. Operating out of the fifth floor of Police Headquarters on Beaubien Street, Red Squad informers zealously infiltrated Detroit’s radical community groups, both black and white. According to the media, the “Detroit police and other law enforcement agencies kept tabs on groups such as the Republic of New Afrika [sic], the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party and [even] the Girl Scouts of America,” because they had “heard the organization was championing a unified world government.”139

White racial and political conservatives were not only glad to see this crackdown; they were also encouraged that law enforcement was busily rooting out threats to community security with STRESS. While such Detroiters felt that Mayor Gribbs had made many mistakes since taking office, they appreciated the fact that he actively supported this undercover decoy unit. Whereas the formation of STRESS had outraged and politicized city blacks in radical ways and had captured the attention of revolutionary whites as well, conservative whites felt that STRESS was the only group working to control chaos and disruption in the Motor City. And, as the black and white revolutionaries in the SEC mobilized to disband this undercover police unit, conservative whites mobilized with equal fervor to make sure that STRESS was there to stay.

In response to the large anti-STRESS rally organized by the SEC in Kennedy Square, conservative whites, led by autoworker Richard Grant, held a pro-STRESS rally to let the mayor know how much they appreciated what he had been doing in the city.140 Several other pro-law enforcement white Detroiters expressed their views in local newspapers. As Christine Kojowski wrote to the Detroit Free Press on September 20, 1971, “STRESS has done a tremendous job in trying to make our streets safer. They deserve praise and citizen support.” Writing to the same paper, a Mr. Smith said, “It is interesting to note, in passing, that so-called leaders of the black community (only the black community) are trying to sabotage STRESS, which leads to the inevitable conclusion that it is only young blacks that are doing the mugging. I hear no outcries from the white community.”

To the dismay of conservative whites, however, an event took place in 1972 that seriously jeopardized STRESS’S longevity. On the morning of March 9, “STRESS officers unknowingly targeted and killed, not a private citizen, but a Wayne County Sheriff Deputy, and wounded two additional Deputies” as well.141 Not surprisingly, this shocking episode caused Mayor Gribbs great embarrassment and led even him to question the wisdom of a decoy task force like STRESS.

On March 9, Wayne County Sheriff Aaron Vincent was hosting a poker party in his apartment at 3210 Rochester Street in Detroit. Vincent’s neighbor Albert Sain was there, as were his law enforcement coworkers Harry Duval, David Davis, Henry Henderson, and James Jenkins. And unbeknownst to this group, outside of Vincent’s apartment building a STRESS crew was patrolling. When STRESS officers saw a man enter 3210 Rochester Street with a handgun, two of them, Ronald Martin and James Harris, followed the man into the building after calling the DPD for backup. For reasons that never became clear, Martin and Harris, along with DPD officers Shiemke and Marshall, burst into Sheriff Vincent’s apartment with guns blazing. According to later deputy testimony, these officers from STRESS and the DPD then forced Deputy Henderson to stand up against the kitchen wall, where allegedly Officer Dennis Shiemke proceeded to kill him. Before Henderson was shot, he had been waving his Wayne County Sheriff’s ID above his head, trying to identify himself to Shiemke, and reportedly he had cried, “‘Man, you are all wrong, why are you doing this?’” before a fatal bullet ripped through his body.142 What finally brought an end to the shooting spree (but not before one man had been killed and two others critically injured) was Deputy Sheriff David Davis’s ability to persuade DPD officer Marshal that he, too, was a member of law enforcement. “This is D.E.,” Davis shouted to Marshall from behind a door, “you know me from the Argyle Bar!”143

When the shooting spree finally ended, other police officers arrived to report on the carnage there. One of these reporting officers later testified that when he arrived on the scene, he “observed the STRESS officers hold a private conference with DPD officers Shiemke and Marshall . . . allegedly to synchronize their accounts of the raid.”144 All of the synchronizing in the world, however, could not mitigate the fact that STRESS had murdered fellow members of law enforcement and that this was a public relations disaster for the mayor. Under pressure from the SEC, which immediately held a 2,000-person anti-STRESS rally at the University of Detroit, prosecutors pressed charges against STRESS officers for the first time, and virtually every city agency called on Police Commissioner Nichols to explain why they should not force STRESS to disband.

Detroit Police Commissioner John F. Nichols and Mayor Roman Gribbs, October 15, 1970. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Conservative whites did not sit by passively as this political pressure against STRESS mounted. These citizens again went to the newspapers to register their strong feeling that STRESS must stay, despite the unfortunate mistake that black and white radicals were calling the “Rochester Street Massacre.” As a Mrs. Wsp wrote, “I beg Detroiters not to be carried away by sympathy for criminals! We need STRESS! The choice is between STRESS and crime!” And, in response to the notion that STRESS only had brought chaos, not crime reduction, to the Motor City, a Mrs. Orb wrote, “STRESS has, rather, created an atmosphere of hope and confidence among the honest and law abiding citizens of Detroit.”145 It was a good sign to these whites that Mayor Gribbs publicly refused to disband STRESS when asked to do so on March 17, 1972.146 They were not certain, however, that Gribbs would have the last word. Despite the growth of a viable white conservative politics in Detroit, radicals clearly were quiet powerful as well. And, of course, black and white liberals hostile to STRESS still held a number of influential positions in the Motor City. Thus, white conservatives reasoned, they must keep fighting for their law enforcement vision.

Indeed, despite the solidification of both a radical and a conservative political challenge in the Motor City from 1969 to 1972, black and white liberals did not give up their claim to lead Detroit. From the minute they extinguished the fires of the 1967 uprising, liberal leaders never wavered from their commitment to integrate all city schools, never stopped questioning the DPD’s tactics, and never stopped believing that moderate political solutions to social, economic, and racial distress were the most practical in the long run. As Detroit had become a war zone after 1969, however, both their benevolent attitude toward black radicalism and their dismissal of white conservatism as a fringe element did change. Between 1969 and 1972, the New Detroit–style liberal position that black militants must be given a voice and that white conservatives, while disruptive and counterproductive, could be ignored, crumbled.

White and black liberal leaders alike were late to recognize the very real political threat posed by the city’s conservative whites. Even though Roman Gribbs had defeated their candidate in the 1969 election, and even though Gribbs clearly was a conservative, city liberals tended to focus on the fact that the extreme conservative candidate Mary Beck had lost, and that they continued to hold an enormous degree of power in the city. Indeed liberals still controlled the City Council and still headed virtually every official committee in the TAP, MDT, New Detroit, and the School Board. But when conservative whites successfully mobilized to remove every liberal representative on the Detroit School Board, liberal leaders finally acknowledged the power of their adversaries. In response, civic liberals decided to take conservatives on directly. For example, after the recall of the four liberal School Board members, leaders of the NAACP filed a lawsuit that, at least initially, resulted in an even more comprehensive desegregation plan than the one white conservatives had so vehemently opposed. Not surprisingly, such liberal counterattacks upped the ante in the ongoing war for control of the Motor City.147

Likewise, conflict escalated as black and white liberal leaders in Detroit began to change their tune about the city’s black militants. It soon began to dawn on these liberals that New Detroit’s plans to listen to, and even to fund, black radicals had seriously gone awry. In 1967, black militants still were relatively marginal figures who liberals believed only posed a long-term threat if they ignored civil rights matters in the city. By 1968, however, such “marginal” black radicals had managed to take over the media of key liberal institutions such as WSU, and were encouraging black students to take over the very schools that liberal School Board members were trying to integrate. And, worse yet, black radicals had joined with whites in the call for an all-out urban revolution. Liberal leaders soon were just as determined to prevent black or white revolutionaries from taking over as they were to stop white conservatism in its tracks. A case in point is the battle touched off between radicals and liberals after John Watson of the Inner City Voice became editor of the WSU student paper, the South End.

When Watson took over the South End, he made no secret of the fact that he was going to turn that paper into a vehicle for revolution and that its pages would be filled with news and editorials to that end. But because he was elected, and because this was a newspaper protected by constitutional mandates, Watson felt that he was on pretty safe ground with the liberal administration at WSU: Surely, it would not tread on the democratic process and the sacred American principle of freedom of the press. On February 13, 1969, though, the university’s Board of Governors stated publicly that “we, individually as alumni and collectively as directors of the Wayne State Fund, are deeply concerned about the posture of the University-sponsored newspaper, ‘the South End.’” The board specifically noted the paper’s “vulgar expressions” and “its hate-mongering verbiage”148 Member Arthur Greenstone went further to suggest that, “the newspaper has been inflammatory and racist” and also “anti-Semitic. There is no other word for it. Goebbels would be proud.”149 The WSU board officially went on record “that a small politically motivated group has captured control of the South End under the guise of freedom of speech.”150 And when a self-described “hippie,” Cheryl McCall, became the editor of the South End for a brief moment in 1969, the president of WSU officially suspended the paper on July 10, 1969, “until the Student Newspapers Publications Board can review and investigate the entire problem of vulgarity and obscenity and lack of reference to the student community in this paper.”151

Some liberal leaders were very uneasy about the civil liberties implications of shutting down the paper and of the WSU board’s open hostility to Watson’s editorship of the South End. For instance, board member and UAW leader Leonard Woodcock noted uncomfortably in 1969 that “there was not this gathering of opinion at the end of a full year of control of the South End by a white group.”152 To many other liberals, however, the war for the control of the Motor City now had become so ugly that going to extreme lengths in order to defeat radicals was, in fact, reasonable.

Between 1967 and 1972, as radicals, conservatives, and liberals each came to fight for their distinctive vision of Motown’s future, Detroit had become a war zone. The racial and political polarization that was in evidence as the Motor City burned in 1967 only deepened thereafter. After that year, serious political alternatives to postwar liberalism emerged, and the fate of the Motor City was most uncertain. Even by 1972, no one yet could have predicted who was ultimately going to win the seemingly intractable battle for civic control. The city’s fate was made even more unpredictable because the new political power bases that had emerged in the urban center between 1967 and 1972 had also emerged in the auto plants. These two worlds still were inexorably linked.