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PART I: I JUST WANNA TESTIFY |
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Thursday, 12 January 2006 10:03 |
"I Just Wanna Testify"
By John Sinclair
"Renaissance? Re-nascence?
But what do you DO?"
--George Tysh
Detrolt, l964
I came to Detroit in 1964 for the same reason young men have always abandoned the boondocks for the big clty: that's where the action was, and I was desperate to be ln the mlddle of it. By the time I left Detroit four years later, I was in the middle of much more action than I could possibly handle, and I had to split town before it all caught up with me. But even that wasn't enough, and within a year the long blue arm of the Detroit Narcotics Squad had reached out into Ann Arbor and pulled me back into a Motor Clty courtroom. I was convicted of possessing two joints of marijuana and sentenced to ten years in prison--without bond or possibility of parole.
My last coherent memory of the sprlng of 1968 in Detroit revolves around the assassination of Martin Luther King and the three-day "preventive curfew" called by Detroit police to insure the maintainence of law and order in the nation's fifth largest city, a massive urban jungle still wholly torn by the worst rioting in the history of these states just the summer before.
All citizens were ordered off the streets at 8:00 p.m., leaving the city entirely to the 5000-man Detroit Police Department all through the night. The communal headquarters of any number of small groups of known activists, Black and whlte, were kept under 24-hour surveillance. The most notorious of this select group were treated to sadistic displays of police harassment by officers operating without restraint or fear of censure.
Nothing was happening but the police. They had everything covered, and if you moved after dark you were snatched up and taken to jail without fail. If you stayed inside they came in after you, kicking down the doors and ransacking everything in sight. Where they knew the occupants were armed for self-defense they moved with more caution: police cars would cruise up and down the streets outside such houses, issuing threats over their loudspeakers and shining their supercharged spotlights into the windows, returning every half hour or so to repeat their vicious tricks until you were afraid to go to sleep.
Detroit was Police City, baby, and you never forgot it--not for a minute. Civil war raged across the city, an ice-cold war between whites and blacks in the political arena whlch was from time to time illuminated by the ferocious flames of actual street warfare. The more-than-90%-white Detroit Police Department operated openly and quite proudly as the last line of defense against the "savage niggers" who were taking over the white folks' town.
Backed to the hilt by the big money of industry and finance and its guardians in city hall, the front-line troops of the DPD were charged with the awesome, almost impossible responsibility of keeping the Blacks and their white renegade allies firmly in line at all times. Brutal excess was literally the order of the day, and the whole city suffered under a vibe so intense and evil that it hit you smack in the face as soon as you stepped out into the street.
* * * * *
When I came back to Detroit in 1974 it was a very different city. The once-ubiquitous police squad cars were now few and far between, and when you saw one cruising slowly down a side street in the central city it was likely to contain two Black officers, a Black and a white, or even a male and a female officer, most of them looking well under 30 and offering a strangely subdued face to the increasingly Black world around them.
The endless streets of Detroit, once filthier than you would care to imagine, had taken on a whole new identity, a clean mien which rose to a sparkle in the city's many intact neighborhoods and dropped to a dull shine in even the most desolate areas of town. The rebuilding of downtown Detroit had begun, with the skeletal towers of the fabled Renaissance Center already redefining the skyline, and the decrepit old Motor City was fairly humming with a brand new dynamism--nothing tangible, really, except as spirit life is tangible to those who are attuned to it, but definitely alive and in the very air.
The war which had ripped apart the basic fabric of life in Detroit was over, at least for the time being, and while the police still bristled it was clear that their day as the saviors of Detroit's uniquely American system of apartheid was over too. Not that they had failed, exactly, but more like they had never had a snowball's chance in hell, to coin a phrase.
Inexorable historical forces moving beyond the modest range of their intelligence had already determined the outcome of their desperate kampf against the African-American population, and the fatal blow came when then-Police Commissioner John "Black Jack" Nlchols lost an extremely close decision in the mayoral race of November 1973.
Emerging victorious from the bitter electoral contest for control of the city was Detroit's first Black mayor--a lifelong labor activist, floor leader of the Michigan State Senate, Democratic National Committeeman, former commie agitator, and my main man: the Honorable Coleman Alexander Young.
* * * * *
"Keep your eye on the money," Coleman is telling me as we sit discussing his first four years in the mayor's office. Out the window, long heavy ore boats trudge their way down the Detroit River to Henry Ford's River Rouge facility, site of many bloody UAW organizing battles in the not-so-distant past. The $337-million Renaissance Center now completed and already hustling with activity, shimmers in the afternoon sunlight just a stone's throw up the riverfront.
"These rich guys aren't putting millions of dollars into downtown Detroit because they think it's good for people. They're gonna make a ton of money out of this venture, and Ford's people are already buying up whole blocks of land all over the downtown area so they'll be able to make out even better in succeeding stages of redevelopment.
"Hell, if I had any damn money I'd be dolng the same damn thlng myself, but you know as well as I do that there isn't enough capital in the Black buslness community to rebuild a damn city block, let alone the whole city. So if we want to do anythlng at all, we have to work along with the money guys and get them to see, as they have in fact begun to realize, that our interests are the same as regards the future of the city.
They have to deal with it because it's the center of the economic life of the whole damn region, and we have an interest whlch is quite clear because this is where we live, this is the place where we are going to begin to develop the kind of city we want to live in. We don't have anything else, you see, and that's exactly why this partnership means so much to the citizens of Detroit. We need the construction, we need the jobs, the tax revenues, and right now especially we need the visible, tangible signs of commitment to the future of the city that the Renaissance Center represents."
Coleman leans back in the mayor's chair and lets the suppressed chuckle that seems to be always just under the surface of his conversation, no matter how serious the subject, escape its temporary prison. Coleman is a man who loves to laugh, an earthy, supremely cultured product of the streets of Detrolt's old Black Bottom who has outlasted his lifelong opponents to become, at the age of 59, not only the mayor of the city he grew up in as a ghetto youth and radical union organizer, but the best damn mayor in the history of Detroit.
Coleman has hls hands on the levers of political power now, and it is with tremendous relish that he moves those levers this way and that to make things happen the way he's wished they'd happen his entire life. With everything beginning to turn up roses after four impossibly hard years in office, Coleman is clearly savoring the sweet smell of political success, and nothing is more satisfying to the Mayor than having turned Detroit's 50-year economic tailspin upside down.
"Let 'em look at that $337-million worth of mirrors over there and say that Detroit is dying. No way, man. We've got this thing turned around now, and the doom-sayers and doubters who've done their best to destroy Detroit are just talking to each other these days. Anybody who isn't totally blind can see what's happening here, and they're all gonna start creeping back into the city to try to get their hands on some of the action.
But things are very different now, and they're gonna have to deal with a whole different set of people--folks they wouldn't've given the time of day to 10 years ago."
* * * * *
No one is in a better positlon to know just how much things have changed in Detroit since Coleman Young's election than the Mayor himself, who reminded his constituency during the first mayoral contest that he had "come up on the other end of the nlghtstick" from his opponent, the reigning chief of police. And not just on the streets, either, but in the head-knocking unlon organizing battles of the 1930s and 40s, where Coleman was one of a very small number of Black labor activists in the United States.
"There was a barbershop in my neighborhood where a bunch of union organizers used to come. This was in the 30s, while I was in high school. I'd sit around and listen to these guys argue union politics--all kinds of social ideologies, and I knew them all. Marxists, Trotskyists, Social Democrats....
This was a period of people being thrown out of their homes and the workers moving them back in. I've seen groups of workers invade welfare offices and pass out shoes and clothing where there was too much red tape. There were soup kitchens around, and a lot of turmoil and excitement, whlch I got caught up in.
"I was in a college prep program at Eastern High School and was entitled to a scholarship at the Unlversity of Michigan but got screwed out of it by being Black, even though I was number two in the class. So I entered an apprenticeship program for skilled trades at Ford's, as an electrician.
There were two of us--I came out of the course with 100 on all the goddamn tests. The other guy was white, wlth a 68 average, but his father happened to be a foreman, there was only one job to be had, and I don't have to tell you any more.
"So I found myself in the motor building and became active in the union movement, which at that time was underground at Ford's. They had thugs, fighters, murderers and outright gangsters as 'security men' at the plant, who dressed plain like workers and infiltrated the workers' organizations.
I wasn't as cool as some of the old-timers and talked a little bit too much to the wrong people--the agents didn't wear badges, so you couldn't tell who they were. When my activities in the union became known to the company, they put a big goon on me, on the machine right across from me on the assembly line. He called me a black son of a bitch, or a nigger, some name to provoke a fight, and he started to cross the conveyor line between us.
"I hadn't been raised in the ghetto for nothing, man. I had a steel bar maybe an inch in diameter used to unjam the machinery, and just laid it across his head. He fell into the conveyor full of sharp metal shavings and got dumped into a bucket car. They fired me for fighting, and from then on I became a union organizer.
I was involved in the Ford Rouge Plant strike in May of 41, which forced Fords to recognize and negotiate with the UAW for the first time, and then I went to work for a couple of civil rights organizations. I spent some time at the post office--five months and 29 days, to be exact--and edited the union newspaper until I was fired. See, I made the mistake of calling this supervisor a Hitler, and that of course was my ass.
"When I came out of the post office I joined a local civil rights coalition that was fighting to integrate the new Sojourner Truth housing projects in the northeast end of town. The racists down there, many of them not so long off the boat from Warsaw or Krakow, were opposing having Blacks move into that area of the city.
There was a real lynch atmosphere--in fact the President, FDR, ended up havlng to send in 1750 troops before Blacks could move in--but we eventually won that right, where probably for the first time in the civil rights movement we introduced the union tactlcs of mass protest and picketing. This strike ushered in a new militancy, the recognition that you had to do more than kiss ass and negotiate behind closed doors.
"Then I was drafted into the Army, where we forced open the Officers' Club to Blacks and were arrested and put in the brig for a while. Coming out, the post office union I helped organize--public workers--put me on the payroll as an international rep. So I proceded to help organize Detroit city employees--the same guys who are giving me trouble now.
"In 1947 I was elected Director of Organization of the Wayne County CIO, at the time the highest elected position of any Black labor figure. The whole idea of a Black caucus emerged there. In 48 I split with the union and the Democratic Party because I went to work for Henry Wallace's third-party campaign. Wallace was the first candidate in the history of the nation who went into the deep South, together with Paul Robeson, and defied the Jim Crow segregation laws. Now that was something in 1948.
"I waa a pretty hungry guy after losing the next CIO election due to supporting Henry Wallace, so I went back to my original skill for a whlle--dry cleaning, spotting, etc.--my father's trade. In 1951 I helped found the National Negro Labor Council, an association of Black caucuses in the union movement across the country. We had two main thrusts: to fight for the promotion of Black leadership within the unions, and to fight against job discrimination against Blacks.
We eventually cracked the UAW, and on the economic front we finally forced Sears to hire Blacks for jobs beyond janitor. We were picketing, believe it or not, for the right to be served in downtown Detroit, and even on 12th Street. That's how recent this change has been.
"Well, of course all this activity was regarded as dangerously subversive, and in February of 1952 I was called up before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. This was during the height of McCarthyism, when they were going into different cities and literally terrorizing people. The mere mention of somebody's name by some damn stool pigeon was enough to get them fired, and in some cases physically harmed.
I've forgotten the name of the chairman of the damn thing--he was from Alabama, and we did a little research on him. We found out that about 85% of his district was Black, but Black people weren't allowed to vote. And he's gonna lecture me about 'un-American activities.' I said, 'I ain't gonna take this shit,' and I did not.
"That was the beginning of the end. We beat the HUAC attack back, but soon afterwards the NNLC became a victim of the Subversive Activities Control Board, whlch we called SCAB. We were declared a subversive activity. They said the NNLC was a Communist organization and that Coleman Young, who heads the organization, is one of the leading Communists in the United States. 'He takes orders directly from Moscow,' and all that bullshit.
Well, somebody in Congress inserted the whole goddamn report into the Congressional Record, with no proof or anything, and every time I run for office somebody brings up that damn 'official record.' We tried to answer the charges, but it cost us 35 or 40,000 dollars just to draw up a brief for the first hearing, and it broke the organizatlon. So we dissolved the NNLC in l954, burned all our membership records, and I went out into the streets to try to find some work, which was difficult as hell since I was on the blacklist.
"I went back to Ford's and got fired on the 90th day of my 'probation' period. I went to Dodge Main in Hamtramck and got a job in the foundry, where they put all the Blacks then, but a superintendent recognized me on my way to the foundry and ordered me removed from the plant.
I worked odd jobs around town after that, between 1955 and 1960, when I reentered politics by running as a delegate to the state constitutional convention. Then I was elected to the Michigan Senate in 1964, where I fought against racial discrimination in the Detroit Police Department and the State Police, authored the Detroit school decentralization bill, and pushed for low-lncome housing and a steeply-graduated state income tax, which I'm still trying to get through.
We got the state's Open Housing Act passed, and I pushed very early for abortion law reform, police review boards, consumer protection legislation, and a drastic revision of the state's ridiculous marijuana laws.
"Still, the city of Detroit meant a great deal to me, and I left the Senate in 1973 to run for mayor because I felt the time was right to successfully challenge the all-white Detrolt Police Officers Association leadership and the incipient police-state situation that had forced Detroit into utter social and economic stagnation.
"The DPOA [the pollce unlon] galned political control of the city in 1969, when Sheriff Roman Gribbs squeaked by Richard Austin, the first major Black candidate for Mayor--who is now Michigan Secretary of State. They put out a statement that the DPOA was going to run and elect its own candidate, that they were in effect going to take over the city and run it the way they wanted to.
These are the people who constantly refer to the Black citizens of the city, in their newsletter, as 'jungle bunnies.' Gribbs managed to run the city straight downhill for four years, and then the DPOA announced that it was going to run the damn police chief this time. That was the last straw for me, and I set out to beat Nichols so we could get this city turned around and start back on the right track again."
Detroit
1978
(c) 1978, 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Continued: Part II: Turning Detroit Around
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