For years I have heard the story of my father working at the Detroit Edison Electric plant at 1 Energy Way, Detroit during the ’67 Detroit riot. I think the first time I was told about it was when I was doing a family history for a school project in the fifth grade. My dad and his grandfather both worked at the Electrical plant where as my grandfather, my father’s father, worked at the water treatment facilities. Though I’ve heard the story a few times I thought that I should try to gather a more comprehensive understanding of not only the riots but also how they affected my family. Although Mark, my dad, can tell a great story it is very rare that he tells anyone anything when they ask to be told it. Before talking to my dad about what he remembers of the ’67 riots it seemed a good idea that I talk to my mother first, as she often remembers the past far better than my father and would be able to supply me with some ideas of what to ask my dad. However, talking to my mom about the riots and then my dad proved to make my understanding of their lives in 1967 much more confusing than I thought it would be. Eventually what I had initially determined would be one interview about the past became three. As I attempted to find what was true and what was the result of misremembering in my parents stories I found it helpful to also speak to one of their best friends form their youth. The three stories together all contribute to one understanding I have now, not just of the riots but also of my father, Mark.
In talking to my mom about my father during the ’67 riots I was told a truly fascinating story. “What you have to understand first,” she told me “was that nearly all the police were white.” It had been a hot summer, and in the early hours of a Sunday morning at the end of July the police raided an after hours blind pig (a speak easy.) That same morning, as my mother tells it, Mark and her brother Rick were downtown at he Grande Ballroom. On their way home their car broke down and they had to call for a ride home from my mom’s mom, Jessie. While waiting to get picked up from their broken down car Mark and Rick were warned by a stranger to get out of the city as fast as they could because something terrible was about to happen if they stayed around. Although Mark and Rick got out of the city with out much trouble not everyone was so lucky. “Things got bad very quickly,” my mom, told me, “looting and property destruction would begin in one place and move out in wave to other neighborhoods.” What was shocking to most people at the time even today still resonates about the riot was that much of it was perpetrated by blacks in their own neighborhoods. There was a sense of desperation but also mindlessness about the riots that scared everyone. By Tuesday, July 25, the National Guard occupied and closed down the city. As my mom explains it my dad was issued a Civil Defense card in order to allow him to get to work and pass through the barricades that the National Guard had put in place all over the city. The aftermath of the riots was that the city had been irrevocably changed. Not only had the demographic been altered by white flight as many of the few remaining white families left the city but also the physical layout of the city was different. My mom described this to me by saying that “the city had changed at major destruction roads were the rioting had been especially concentrated.” Entire neighborhoods had been burned to the ground during the riots. White and black owners abandoned shops that had been looted. Living in Herman Gardens, the projects nearly outside of the city, my mom can remember the sudden influx of African-American families who moved into her building as a result of losing their home during the riots. She can remember the principal of her school remarking to her mother on the furniture that was being moved into the buildings with these families; how it was so extravagant, plush, and gilded; how it was all looted goods.
Mark’s story is far less intriguing. To hear it from my father the riot didn’t really happen; or at least, not to him. When I asked Mark about the Civil Defense card he was issued during the riots he just said, “I never had a Civil Defense card.” After a long pause I asked him about what working at the Detroit Edison Electrical Plant was like during the riot and he said that he worked there in ’68, not ’67. When I asked him about the story my mom told me about his car breaking down and him having to call my grandmother for a ride and he and my uncle being warned to get out of the city he had no recollection of it ever happening. More than that he denied that it had ever happened. Mark’s story about the summer of 1967 is incredibly banal, and not just by comparison of my mother’s. In 1967 Mark claims that he worked at a automotive factory constructing 8th inch sound deadening mats out of tar and felt for the floors of cars. The detail with which he remembers this job is astounding when considering everything else he told me. I asked Mark what downtown was like, in his memory, during the riot. He told me that on the first day of the riot, Sunday, July 23rd, that the busses were still running, and that he and his best friend Kenny went down to Wayne State’s campus to see a friend of theirs. After driving around for a little while in their friends car Mark claims that they saw little more than a few tanks and a truck full of soldiers. This is entirely impossible, but so too is much and many of my father’s stories. Sensing how anticlimactic his recollection had been for me Mark apologized, again denied everything my mother had said, and suggested that I go with her story anyways, whether it was true or not.
Between these two stories I found not a single iota of similarity. No resemblance what so ever exists in what my mom told me and what my father told me about the summer of 1967 in their lives or in a wider specter of the city’s history. In order to truly understand what my parents were talking about I would have to consult someone who knew both of them at the time and also lived in the city. I got the phone number of my parents’ best friend Shirley who now lives in Texas and gave her call.
The story Shirley told me far better conformed to what my mom had told me about the riot (and my father) and also what I had already thought I knew to be true. In 1967 Shirley was in school at Cass Technical High School. “Once the riots began things in the city heated up very quickly,” Shirley said. She continued by explaining to me that the fear outside of the city was that the looting and building burning that was going inside of the city was going to spread out into the suburbs. “People were shocked of course when that didn’t happen,” she went on, “and that instead the rioters just kept burning down their own neighborhoods.” Part of fear that everyone was feeling was due in part to the fact that, unlike today, there was limited news media available dispensing information about the riots. “Radio and T.V. were really all we had for finding out what was happening and where the danger was. No one knew how far or how fast the violence was going to or had escalated,” Shirley told me when I asked her about this. After the riots had for the most part been stopped the danger did not end. Fires continued long after the troops were deployed within the city to quell the violence. “It was like a war zone in the city. Whole neighborhoods were gone already and that’s when people began to get the idea of ‘hey, I’ve got some dead property I need to get off my hands; it wasn’t much good before all this it’ll be worth even less now; I can burn it,’” Shirley went on. She described this as a prevailing sense of ‘opportunism’ that grew out of the riots. This opportunism had nothing to do with the riots, race issues and civil unrest; it was just about property values and money. What is most interesting about this to me is that it speaks to another aspect of the riot which both my mother and Shirley agreed on: the majority of the destruction was done by people who would have more to be upset about and were left with less after the riots than they had had before them. The initial outbreak of the riot was caused by social unrest in the most racially challenged city in the country at the time but the strongest effects of the violence were caused by the numerous and literal flare up of fires afterwards.
After she had described all of this to me, spoken about the riots, I asked Shirley if she could tell me about where she was during them and if she had any idea about why my father’s story was so different form my mother’s and her own. Shirley described the riots as being a period of time longer than just the last week of July that summer. She told me that that year at Cass Tech. members of the Black Panthers would come into her school and pull the fire alarm, forcing all ten floors of the building to evacuate into the streets. Afterwards the Panthers would take up fire hoses and force anyone trying to come into the building out of it. She said that when the riots started at first she felt the way she did when the Black Panthers pulled the fire alarm; she was just wanted to get out of the way and get home.
Shirley thinks that something like this same sentiment must have effect my father and that for him the riots were not as big of deal as everything else going on in his personal life was. In 1967 Mark would have been in school at Wayne State and working at his job if not a full time than nearly. He had his own problems to worry about, even if the city he lived in was burning down around him. I figure that there must be some truth in this idea. I’d ask Mark but he is just as bad at talking about himself as he is at talking about everything else I am interested in hearing about. I think that in this situation, as with most, it is best that I trust the stories I have heard about my dad rather than those he has to tell.
In my mom’s story and even in Shirley’s my dad is kind of a hero, Mark is working hard and full of determination and doing his job at a scary time, and I like that. In Mark’s story he’s barely even a character; in my dad’s story he is just some guy getting by as he waits for the future to happen to him. I must say though, that Mark is the most sure person most people will ever met and that when he knows what he wants to do is does it. And that is why when I consider these stories and how Mark’s is so unlike my mom’s and Shirley’s I am unsure if it is because his memory is humble, or if he is just not impressed by the those things he does which everyone else finds to be so impressive.
As a kid the ballpark itself was the important part, not the game itself. Sure, I enjoyed watching baseball, but my attention span wasn't long enough to really appreciate the game. But the hot dog vendors, the cheering masses, the wave, the peanuts, and my dad sitting next to me are what still stick out in my mind.
At the tail end of summer, Caleb, Stef and I headed into the city for Michigan and Trumbull and parked in a gravel lot right next to the stadium. I hadn't been there in years, but I still remembered the feeling of elation as the claustrophobic tunnel opened up to get a view of a bright green field and thousands upon thousands of people. This time was different, though it brought back all the same memories. Tiger Stadium was deserted as we approached the fence, the infield covered in piles of rubble ten feet high. The only part of the stadium left standing were the walls behind home plate, rising high above the refuse, gutted. It looked as if an earthquake had hit it, or a bomb. We slipped under the fence and wandered between the piles of debris towards the towering structures above. The field was covered with concrete, steel, dust and strewn among the debris were hundreds of broken seats... everywhere bright spots of blue and orange among the grey and rust-hued remains. Heading away from the rubble, the outfield was clear, clean... looking more like the field of a park than what once was an immaculately kept lawn.
istakable. I was at Tiger Stadium once more and on the field for the first time in my life. My only regret is that I hadn't brought a baseball and a bat or maybe a glove, so the field could experience baseball one last time. I'm not usually one to personify or believe in spirits or ghosts, but there is part of me that thinks it would have made a difference. Maybe some of that concrete had soaked up the experiences of the century or they had seeped into the soil I was standing upon, the ground that had been known as Bennet Park, Navin Field, Briggs Field and finally Tiger Stadium. At least, I would like to think so, because there is not much left otherwise.
