The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (36 page)

Inequality was not confined to Detroit’s housing market. Detroit’s economy was also being transformed in ways that bore heavily on black migrants. The auto industry, which had attracted many black workers to the city, restricted blacks to certain jobs and rarely hired them in supervisory positions. At the very point that large numbers of blacks were coming to the city, automation was transforming the auto industry, shrinking the number of jobs. Detroit-based auto companies like Hudson, Nash, Fraser, Briggs, Kaiser, and Packard didn’t survive and were bought out and phased out amidst the downturn.
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The city experienced four recessions during the 1950s, and black Detroiters were disproportionately hard hit. Jobs fell from 338,000 in 1947 to 153,000 in 1977, while Detroit’s black population rose from 300,000 in 1950 to 759,000 by 1980.

Schools in Detroit were also separate and unequal, with inner-city black students often viewed by teachers and administrators as uneducable and tracked toward vocational education. In 1962,
Ebony
reported in a lengthy feature, titled “School Segregation Up North,” on the pattern of school segregation across Northern cities—45 percent of black students in Detroit attended schools that were more than 80 percent black.
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The curriculum was out of date and filled with racial stereotypes, and almost no attention was paid to African American or global history or literature. In 1963, when Northwestern High School students protested the lack of black history in their textbook, some teachers responded, “Black people didn’t do anything.”
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This meager schooling produced a dropout rate nearing 50 percent among black youth, while the unemployment rate for blacks under twenty-five hovered between 30 and 40 percent.
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And black high school graduates in the city still earned an average of $1,600 less than white graduates, in part because blacks also were locked out of skilled training schools.
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Yet city officials denied these patterns of systemic racial inequality in housing, schools, jobs, and public services. Casting themselves as “color-blind,” public officials often castigated sectors of the black community as lacking the values, work ethic, and cultural skills necessary for success and attributed inequities to larger cultural deficits within the black community. This “culture of poverty,” as it would be known by the mid-1960s, accounted for these racial differentials, not governmental action. Similarly, many white Detroiters asserted their rights as property owners and parents to advocate racially discriminatory practices because of the deficits of black parents, homeowners, and renters, while still professing a generic commitment to equal treatment and civil rights.

The claim of a color-blind city rang hollow to most of Detroit’s black community, including Parks. Disappointed by the caution of the NAACP Detroit chapter, local activists called for a mass march to highlight the second-class citizenship of blacks in the city. Reverend C. L. Franklin explained to the
Detroit News
that the march would serve as a “warning to the city that what has transpired in the past is no longer acceptable to the Negro community.”
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On June 23, 1963, Parks joined King at the front of Detroit’s Great March to Freedom.
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Held two months before the March on Washington, this march drew nearly 200,000 Detroiters, rivaling the numbers of the people that would journey to DC in August. Dressed in their Sunday best, “a mighty sea of black faces,” according to marcher Reverend Malcolm Boyd, spilled down Jefferson, filling block after block after block.
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The march was nearly all black in composition. “We didn’t have to walk,” recalled Detroit labor activist General Baker, “but were pushed up Jefferson.”
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Conceived as an act of solidarity with the SCLC’s Birmingham campaign, the march highlighted the severe inequalities in Detroit and helped to accelerate a rising black militancy in the city.

At the finish, in front of a packed Cobo Hall, Reverend Albert Cleage hammered home the problem of northern racism, calling on those gathered to challenge racial inequities in Detroit. King did the same, as Parks recalled, “remind[ing] everybody that segregation and discrimination were rampant in Michigan as well as Alabama.” She found his speech that June day the best she had ever heard him give.
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Calling the march the “greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States,” King condemned racial injustice as “a national problem,” asserting “that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South.” Criticizing gradualism as “little more than escapism,” King told the crowd that “to help us in Alabama and Mississippi and over the South, do all that you can to get rid of the problem here.”
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Curiously, despite Parks’s position at the front of the march, she remained unnoticed by the press that wrote about the event, including the
Michigan Chronicle
, the local black newspaper that covered the event extensively. To mark the occasion, Motown put out its first spoken-word record, which featured King’s speech at the Great March, recorded by Parks’s friend Milton Henry. Parks loved the recording and played it all the time.

That same week, Parks spoke at a luncheon honoring Daisy Bates and Birmingham black businessman A. G. Gaston. There again she made the comparison between what they had done in Montgomery and what people were doing in Detroit to protest housing discrimination. “We had seen Negro children yanked from seats in the white section of the buses as if they were animals and I for one had just had enough of it.”
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Blacks in Detroit experienced the same “tiredness” around the persistence of housing segregation, Parks argued, that black Montgomerians had felt around the inhumanity of bus segregation. They had “had enough” of the liberal inequality that Detroit proffered its black residents. Parks joined the fight around open housing. Open housing advocacy in the early 1960s drew “all sorts of threats, violence,” recalled Detroit City Council member Mel Ravitz.
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On July 27, the Detroit Branch of the NAACP led a crowd of two hundred people to protest housing discrimination in Oak Park. Parks marched at the front and was one of the featured guests along with Myrlie Evers, whose husband, Medgar, had been assassinated a month earlier in Jackson, Mississippi.
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Despite her participation in certain NAACP events, there is no record that Mrs. Parks joined or was active in the Detroit NAACP branch when she first moved to the city.
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Indeed, fellow SNCC activist Martha Norman says that Parks definitely did not join the chapter initially, viewing it as too conservative in this period.
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When the Parks family moved to Detroit, the local branch was the largest in the nation, setting a record membership level in 1956, but quite anti-Communist, moderate, and middle-class focused.
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Along with housing segregation and urban renewal, police repression was a constant affront to black life in the city. As James Baldwin had observed in 1962, “The only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.”
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The
Michigan Chronicle
recorded a steady litany of police abuse and harassment of black Detroiters. For a decade, the Detroit NAACP had called attention to the systemic nature of police brutality and malfeasance in the city. In 1958, after presenting records of 103 complaints from January 1956 to July 1957, they praised the city for finally convening the Citizen’s Advisory Committee on Police Community Relations but nonetheless highlighted the “flagrant violations of citizens’ rights” and “improper and abusive police conduct” that needed to be addressed.
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In 1960, branch executive secretary Arthur Johnson again lambasted the “chronic” nature of police brutality, citing their own records of more than 244 complaints against police over the past five years. Noting “discrimination in all areas of community life,” Johnson explained, it was law enforcement “where Negroes are daily made openly and painfully aware of their second-class status in the community.”
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In forty-seven cases known to the NAACP, the beatings were so severe they led to hospitalization. Yet, Detroit’s major newspapers “had a standing arrangement not to cover incidents of police brutality,” according to Johnson; the NAACP would often send press releases with photos of a new incident to all the major papers, but only the
Michigan Chronicle
would run a story.
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The public silence about this treatment exacerbated this repressive climate.

Thirteen days after Detroit’s Great March, a police officer killed a young black woman, Cynthia Scott. Cutting an impressive figure at six foot four, Scott, a sex worker, was shot twice in the back and once in the stomach by police officer Theodor Spicher. Three days later, the prosecutor ruled that Spicher had shot the “fleeing suspect” in self-defense. While the police claimed that Scott had pulled out a knife, the acquaintance who was with her recounted that she didn’t have a weapon; rather, the police had been harassing her, and when she walked away from them after telling them they had no grounds to arrest her, they shot her. Many in the black community were outraged. Richard Henry, whose brother Milton served as the lawyer on Scott’s case, and Reverend Cleage helped organize a picket line outside police headquarters a week later. Five thousand people demonstrated, yelling “Stop killer cops” and threatening to storm the police building.
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Petitions were circulated to recall the prosecutor.
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Hundreds of people picketed and sat in at police headquarters, and the case became a touchstone for young activists in Detroit and the emergence of the Freedom Now Party.
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Just as the humiliating bus treatment built to a breaking point in Montgomery, the disrespectful treatment of blacks by police in the city was becoming too much to bear. In 1964, the head of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins, noted how police relations had worsened in Detroit.
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In December 1965, Conyers warned about the city’s cockiness in praising itself for getting through the summer without major incident, unlike Watts, or Harlem the previous year: “That just means that the wrong citizen and the wrong policeman didn’t happen to get together.”
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In some public appearances, Parks also made the point of comparing police treatment in Alabama and Michigan.
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Yet, Detroit city officials refused to make any systematic change, preferring to study the problem and convene meetings, just as Montgomery officials had done around bus segregation in the mid-1950s. Indeed, following the 1965 Watts riot, Detroit police grew more aggressive, using new federal funds to create a Tactical Mobile Unit, for “crowd control,” which many black residents viewed as using Gestapo-like tactics.
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And Detroit’s main newspapers paid little attention to police brutality in their own backyards, despite their attention to police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham and other Southern police aggression.

Southern migration, a growing racial consciousness, and a rich black-nationalist tradition transformed the religious landscape of the city in the decades following World War II. Black Detroiters had a rich and varied religious life. Similar to Montgomery, postwar Detroit was home to a handful of activist ministers who challenged the complacency of their white and black peers. Reverends Horace White, Charles Hill, and C. L. Franklin would inspire a new group of ministers to make an independent Christian witness in the city that was not tied to the priorities of city elites. In the prewar years, Detroit’s major black churches maintained an alliance with the car companies, particularly Ford Motor Company, which stifled criticism of the systematic inequality endemic in the auto industry. Ford had required a letter from a minister attesting to an applicant’s “uprightness” and “reliability” in order to hire black men. They rewarded the ministers with gifts and well-paid congregants.
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White and Hill, among others, would break this alliance in their commitment to building a union for black autoworkers.

Inspired by their precedents but also influenced by Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Reverend Albert Cleage would become the leading Christian voice of black nationalism over the decade. Believing the church to be foundational to the black struggle and the black nation, he challenged his fellow Christians to realign their priorities—“I have been an Uncle Tom and I repent”—and commit to the struggle.
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Raised in Detroit, Cleage had attended Oberlin and the University of Southern California, returning home in 1954 to pastor St. Mark’s Presbyterian Church. When that proved stifling, Cleage led part of the congregation in forming a new church, Central Congregational Church. In 1957, the church purchased a building on Twelfth Street. In the early 1960s, Cleage joined with Richard and Milton Henry to build the Group on Advanced Leadership (GOAL), an all-black organization designed to be a “chemical catalyst” in the struggle for racial justice “because something more needed to be done about police brutality, Negro-removal disguised as urban renewal, Negro-hating textbooks and the lack of black business.”
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Urban renewal proved the radicalizing factor for Richard Henry and other black nationalists in the city. These Detroit radicals joined with others throughout the country to found the Freedom Now Party, a political party separate from the Democratic and Republican parties to promote the interests of black people. The Henrys, who would become some of the leading black militants in the city, worshipped at Central. From 1961 to 1965, they published the bimonthly
Illustrated News
on pink newsprint; it became a venue for an emerging black nationalism in the city. Rosa Parks read it carefully.
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