Epilogue

The trial of James Johnson is over but the implications will reverberate throughout this Motor City and its factories for years to come.1

Just as Detroit’s dramatic civic and labor movement transformation between 1973 and 1985 was rife with irony—primarily because those who won the wars for urban and shop-floor control had paid such a high price for their victory—so was James Johnson’s life over this period.

Any hope that Johnson would finally get real help for his serious emotional problems by being institutionalized was never realized. From virtually the moment that he entered Michigan’s mental health system, the two psychiatrists with whom he had the most regular contact were Dr. Lynn Blunt and Dr. Ames Robey. Both had impeccable credentials and impressive clinical experience, and each had taken the time to familiarize himself with the facts in Johnson’s criminal trial.2 Also, both disagreed with the diagnosis that had landed Johnson in their care. In one of his first psychiatric assessments of Johnson, Blunt found absolutely no evidence “whatsoever of schizophrenia or any other psychotic illness.”3 Likewise, after Robey evaluated Johnson, he decided that Johnson’s “major problem was a long-standing character disorder of explosive, passive-aggressive, or schizoid type,” not “real” schizophrenia.4 These determinations were not just a matter of semantics. In Robey’s opinion, during Johnson’s trial, the defense’s “psychiatrist exaggerated or he, the patient, exaggerated and lied about symptoms to expedite a release from his charges.”5 It appeared to irk Robey that Johnson was “projecting all of his problems, his past crimes, and the rest of any difficulties in his life into the more or less socially acceptable ‘wastebasket’ of racial discrimination,”and that Johnson showed “no insight into any area of difficulty in his own psychopathology and continues to emphatically insist that the entire situation arose out of one based solely on racial prejudice.”6

The extent to which Blunt shared Robey’s conviction that Johnson was manipulative, and that he had exaggerated the impact of racial discrimination on his life, seemed obvious to Johnson himself on August 19, 1971, when he met with Blunt to discuss the possibility of a transfer from the Center for Forensic Psychiatry to the far more prisonlike Ionia. According to Johnsons recollection of this meeting, Dr. Blunt asked him point blank whether he felt he had been justified in pleading not guilty by reason of insanity and, Johnson alleged, Blunt then told him that he personally felt Johnson should have gone to the state penitentiary on a second-degree murder charge. In lieu of a jail sentence, Blunt recommended a transfer to Ionia because, in Johnsons opinion, Blunt felt that he would be “put under extreme pressure” because “sometimes the best way to cure a patient is to break him down all the way.”7 Johnson was so appalled by this discussion about his transfer that he later wrote down every sentence uttered in it and sent the dictation to his sister so that there would be a record. According to Johnson’s notes, Blunt came right out and told him that he should have just gone on welfare instead of killing the people at his job. To this Johnson allegedly replied, “Dr., this is an insult; I have never been on any welfare and never want to be on it as long as I have health and strength to work for a living. ”8

When it became clear that Johnson was being sent to the dreaded Ionia, he asked Blunt a key question: “Tell me. What kind of medical treatment can you recommend, or therapy for a matter of fact, that will make a person more resigned to the type of harassment, exploitation and you name it, and finally complete loss of job that I had suffered for the past two years?” According to Johnson, Blunt allegedly responded by saying, “Well, if I lock you up for the next twenty years you are not likely to kill anybody now, are you?”9 And lock him up they did.

During the next four years, Robey became Johnson’s primary treating psychiatrist. In one of his many evaluations of Johnson, Robey argued that “there was no specific treatment for [Johnson’s] type of personality disorder. ”10 Blunt had concurred that it was quite difficult to treat someone with Johnson’s “sociocultural” profile, particularly when it appeared that “his behavior had surpassed what would be expected of person’s with his background.”11 When Johnson got into a scuffle on his floor one night, during which he tried to stab another patient for making homosexual advances toward him, Blunt apparently did not see such behavior as dysfunctional. He considered it natural behavior for persons who had grown up as did Johnson. As Blunt said about Johnson’s stabbing attempt, “knives were not uncommonly used in fights between people of his particular sociocultural background, but in such fights, both parties usually have a knife.”12

Over this period, Johnson continued to insist that he was racially victimized, and doctors eventually decided to deal with this by giving him medication. For example, after having made numerous comments to a staff psychiatrist such as ”it’s rough, living in this country if you are this color,” Johnson was put on a regimen of 50 milligrams of concentrated Mellaril three times a day to calm his anxiety.13 When he still couldn’t control his racial fixation and began “impulsively acting out” in front of a staff social worker, he was injected with 75 milligrams of Thorazine.14 Over the course of Johnson’s stay in the three mental hospitals, doctors responded to his obsession with racial discrimination by putting him on Chlorpromazine, Stelazine, and Darvon. Try as they might, however, doctors could not cure Johnson of his illness—what company doctor Gordon Forrer described later as Johnson’s habit of bending “his recall and his self-serving manner based on an ever present racial consciousness.”15

Indeed Johnson’s conviction that he was being racially victimized only became more entrenched the longer that he was institutionalized. Johnson became increasingly outspoken about the injustices that he felt he endured while hospitalized. For example, when he was severely beaten for refusing to put on a body shackle during the transfer from the CFP to Ionia, he contacted outside authorities to investigate. According to Johnson, he had been “kicked, punched by personnel and also choked with a towel around his neck”16 The medical doctor who treated him on his arrival at Ionia confirmed that, indeed, Johnson presented with “extensive sub conjunctive hemorrhage,” that “both of his wrists are still slightly swollen,” that “the left little finger now appears swollen and bluish in color,” and that Johnson “still occasionally spits up red blood.”17

By and large, however, Johnson’s complaints about how he was being treated continued to fall on deaf ears, so he eventually sought an early release from the hospital. The opportunity for such a release came accidentally in 1974, as a result of a case known as People v. McQuillen. In this landmark case, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that mental patients who had been institutionalized under not guilty by reason of insanity acquittals could not be held indefinitely in mental institutions unless they still were deemed mentally ill. As soon as the justices handed down the McQuillen ruling, Johnson’s attorneys applied for his release.

Johnson was eventually freed under McQuillen in 1975, but his release was filled with much controversy and irony. The McQuillen rule put Johnson’s treating doctors, Blunt and Robey, in a quite curious position. After all, they had consistently maintained that Johnson was not really insane, only racially obsessed. And yet, the idea that Johnson now would go free was intolerable. According to Johnson Blunt had made it clear that he should pay for his crimes even if it had to be in the mental health, rather than the penal, system. And, although Robey apparently did not believe Johnson was insane any more than Blunt did, he nevertheless wrote to the court that his recommendation for Johnson’s release would not be given. Yet the fact that these psychiatrists long had maintained that Johnson was not “schizophrenic,” as his committing diagnosis suggested, made his release a virtual certainty. But while Johnson finally won his release from the Department of Mental Health, his ordeal with both the mental health system and the legal system was far from over. As it turned out, Johnson’s 1973 workmen’s compensation victory came back to haunt him.

Johnson’s compensation victory had angered many people, but few were more outraged than officials at Chrysler. Just before Johnson was released from Ionia under the McQuillen decision, Chrysler filed an appeal with the Workman’s Compensation Appeal Board, arguing that “fraud was committed at the trial and during the workman’s compensation hearing,” that the “plaintiff [Johnson] makes inconsistent claims in different forums for different purposes,” and that, in order to be released under McQuillen, Johnson had admitted that he was not schizophrenic, that he only suffered from a “personality disorder.” Because this was the position that Chrysler’s doctors had taken in the compensation trial in which Johnson had been awarded his benefits, the company demanded that Johnson’s compensation award be rescinded.18 In essence, Chrysler had rejoined not only the issue of compensation, but also the continuing battle over whether Johnson was or ever had been insane.

In support of its argument before the Appeal Board, Chrysler argued that Johnson’s only problem was that “his psyche causes him to view reality as a racist plot,” and to prove this, it urged the board to accept the original compensation trial testimony of Dr. Forrer over that of the plaintiff psychiatrist, Dr. Clemens Fitzgerald.19 But when Fitzgerald went before the board to vehemently restate his opinion that Johnson’s feelings about societal racism were in fact based in reality (as evidenced even at Johnson’s mental institution, Ionia, where “the entire staff of Ionia State Hospital was Caucasian and, as a result, they frequently mishandled, misused, and actually physically abused and beat some black inmates”),20 Chrysler decided to introduce new psychiatric testimony to persuade the Appeal Board to reverse Johnson’s award. Remarkably the company enlisted the support of Robey, Johnson’s longtime treating physician, to make its case.

In February 1975, attorneys for Chrysler submitted an affidavit from Robey stating that “James Johnson, Jr. following the criminal and compensation trials expressed the deep satisfaction at having been able to [subvert] the principles in the trial by his self-serving narrating.”21 Robey then went on record with his long-held belief that the diagnosis on which Johnson was awarded compensation was bogus. Most surprising of all, however, was Robey’s statement in this affidavit that Johnson “revealed to me and other members of my staff that he was drunk at the time of the triple homicides committed by him.”22 This assertion was critically important because, if Johnson had indeed been drunk on July 15, 1970, when he killed three men, then his insanity plea might well have been disallowed.

While Johnson’s attorneys worked feverishly to prevent Chrysler from introducing Robey’s affidavit into the appeal proceedings, Johnson himself began writing letters to a number of authorities to protest Robey’s actions. He wrote to members of the Compensation Appeal Board, assuring them that he was willing to take a polygraph test in order to prove that he had never told Dr. Robey that he was drunk on July 15, 1970,23 Johnson also filed complaints with the ACLU and the NAACP in which he requested a full investigation of Robey and of the veracity of his affidavit while urging that the proper legal action be taken against Robey for what Johnson referred to as a “criminal act.”24 But despite Johnson’s letters—and despite the curious fact that, midway through the appeal process, Dr. Robey had managed to “misplace” the case notes on which his affidavit was based—the Workman’s Compensation Appeal Board admitted Robey’s affidavit into evidence. It was then up to Johnson’s attorney—once again, Ron Glotta—to address Robey’s allegations on the stand. For days, Glotta hammered away at Robey’s testimony. Finally, after one day of particularly grueling examination and cross-examination, Robey admitted that Johnson never actually said he had been drunk. Robey then alleged that he had objected when Chrysler’s attorney presented him with the affidavit—because “technically [it] wasn’t really correct”—but he was urged to sign it anyway because Chrysler was under a deadline.25

Once Robey admitted that he had signed a false affidavit and alleged that a Chrysler attorney knew it was untruthful,26 Johnson’s troubles should have been over. To his dismay, however, the Workman’s Compensation Appeal Board ruled substantially in Chrysler’s favor and limited Johnson’s benefits to sixteen months instead of life.27 Johnson was very discouraged by this ruling. As he pointed out, “I had barely been in Ionia for a month when 16 months were up... . [I]f I was recovered, what was I doing there for the next four years?”28 But the backlash against Johnson’s 1973 victory did not stop there. In July 1979, after yet another Chrysler appeal to the Workman’s Compensation Board, the board went even further and actually struck “out earlier references to racism at the plant as a factor contributing to Johnson’s mental derangement.”29 That the board had removed any language from the 1973 decision indicating Chrysler’s culpability in his breakdown truly saddened Johnson. As he well knew, the complete reversal of his original compensation verdict indicated that, as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the State of Michigan now saw him as just another black criminal in the city of Detroit who had got away with spending four years in a mental institution instead of a prison.

But while state officials no longer regarded Johnson as a sympathetic character, to many Detroiters, his life story was still a metaphor for all of the disappointments, frustrations, and hopes that had characterized their own lives in the Jim Crow South, the Motor City, and the auto plants between 1945 and 1985. Johnson’s experiences of brutal racial discrimination in Mississippi, in Detroit, and while working at Chrysler had been sadly familiar to many inner-city residents. His vindication in both the criminal and civil courts of Detroit, in turn, had reflected the degree to which their struggles to force the system in more radical directions had paid off. And, finally, when officials eventually stripped Johnson of his earlier victories, these same inner-city residents could relate, with grim recognition. As conservatism outside of Detroit’s city limits rose by the close of the 1970s, they risked losing too much that they had won over the previous tumultuous years.