“Urban Renewal means Negro Removal, and the
federal government is an accomplice to this fact.” James Baldwin
James Baldwin
(1924-1987) was the foremost American essayist of the mid-twentieth century. In “Notes of a Native Son” (1955) he wrote
about going to his preacher stepfather’s funeral during the 1943 Harlem riots and
coming to grips with segregation while a soldier during World War II. A homosexual, Baldwin, spent much of his life
as an expatriate in Paris. “The Fire
Next Time” (1963) contains two essays, “My Dungeon Shook – Letter to My Nephew
on the Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation” and Down At the Cross – Letter
from a Region of My Mind.” The prescient
title was from the Negro spiritual line, “God
gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water but fire next time.”
“Once in a Great
City: A Detroit Story” by David Maraniss covers the 18 months between autumn of
1962 and spring of 1964. In chapter one,
“Gone,” the author discusses the demolition of thriving black businesses along
Hastings Street in Paradise Valley to make way for the Chrysler Freeway. A similar fate awaited the ten-story Gotham
Hotel near Wayne State University, designed by architect Albert Kahn and
purchased in 1943 by African-American John White. For two decades the Gotham was where black
celebrities stayed: athletes such as Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie
Robinson; public officials such as Judge Wade McCree, Reverend Adam Clayton
Powell, and Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr.; entertainers such as the Ink Spots,
Louis Armstrong, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Poet Langston Hughes called the Gotham a
“miracle.” Reverend C.L. Franklin rented an office and often dined with
daughters Erma, Carolyn, and Aretha at its famous Ebony Room. Permanent resident Maxine Powell taught posture,
etiquette and social graces to the Supremes and other Motown groups. After a stay by Martin Luther King, Jr., John
White ordered copies of the civil rights leader’s “Stride Toward Freedom” placed
in every room, alongside the Bible.
The Gotham also was
headquarters for high-stakes dice and card games and policy operations. Looking to make a name for himself and at the
behest of the city’s economic elite, Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards
approved a late-afternoon raid by city police,
state troopers, and IRS agents, who stormed
the hotel with fire axes and sledgehammers.
Chief Detective Art Sage gloated to Commissioner Edwards, “Boss, we got
the whole schmozzle.” Earmarked for
demolition to make way for a never-built hospital parking garage, the
location is presently a vacant lot. Maraniss
wrote: “Some part of Detroit was dying at
the Gotham with every swing of the axe and blow of the sledgehammer.” He concluded:
In the name of progress, the
city powers that be – politicians, planners, developers, construction magnates,
and financiers – had overseen the demolition of large swaths of old black
Detroit. The word on the street for what
was going on was not urban renewal but “Negro removal.”
Similar racist
schemes occurred in other big cities across the country, from New York to
Seattle, Washington. In Chicago, for
instance, urban removal between 1948 and 1973 displaced approximately 200,000
African Americans with the victims receiving little or no compensation. Arnold R. Hirsch, author of “Making the
Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960” wrote: “The city tried to contain the expansion of
African American living space, in part, by using densely packed, centrally
located high-rise public housing.”
"Evel Knievel Ramp"
Urban renewal
affected other low-income groups such as Japanese Americans in San Francisco’s
Western Addition, Mexican Americans in Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine, where Dodger
Stadium was built, and Polish Americans residing in north Philadelphia’s Port
Richmond enclave, including one of Toni’s aunts who lost basically all her
neighbors to make way for a “ghost ramp” (later nicknamed the Evel Knievel ramp
when a plan to connect the Roosevelt Expressway with the Betsy Ross Bridge was
cancelled).
“Negro removal” shares some aspects in common
with nineteenth-century Indian removal.
In each case covetous whites desired land already uninhabited by
relatively powerless people. Christopher Wetzel's “Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization
and identity” (2015) argues that government policies stripped Native Americans
of land in part by pitting one tribal band against others. In the 1830s, for
instance, when the Trial of Death forced the Potawatomi from
Indiana, there were nine separate, fairly autonomous groups, a phenomenon
similar to the Seminole and Creek nations to the south.
Born in 1949, author
David Maraniss lived in Detroit the first six years of his life. I lived in the Detroit suburb of Beverly Hills
during the mid-1950s when Penn Salt Manufacturing Company, transferred my dad
there for 18 months. Like Maraniss, I
recall the Christmas display Ford Rotunda (which burned down the same week as
the Gotham Hotel raid) and baseball games at Briggs Stadium featuring Tiger greats
Al Kaline, Harvey Kuenn, Charlie “Paw Paw” Maxwell, and “Yankee Killer” Frank
Lary. Red Wings stars Gordy Howe and
Alex Delvecchio turned me on the ice hockey when the NHL had only six
teams. I threw a memorable tantrum with
guests in the house when Vic and Midge forbade me to attend a Sunday evening
contest at the Detroit Olympia with a friend’s family. Entering Barnum Junior High, it was a somewhat
difficult adjustment, but I met a lifelong friend, Paul Turk, and I believe the
move made easier my freshman transition at Bucknell five years later. The Gotham Hotel bust occurred on the same
day as the iconic Ford rotunda burned down and the Motown Record Company’s Motortown
revue was touring the segregated South.
In 1962 the Detroit
downtown ruins depicted by photographer Camilo José Vergara four decades later
would have seemed inconceivable.
Maraniss wrote:
Cars were
selling at a record pace. Motown was
rocking. Labor was strong. People were marching for freedom. The President was calling Detroit a “herald of hope.” It was a time of uncommon possibility and
freedom when Detroit created wondrous and lasting things. But life can be luminescent when it is most
vulnerable. There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between
composition and decomposition, what the world gained and what a great city
lost. Even then, some part of Detroit
was dying.
Detroit in 1991; photo by Camilo Vergara
Like in Gary, business
disinvestment and white flight to the suburbs hastened by urban renewal
projects such as the Chrysler Expressway intensified following the 1967 Detroit
Riots, sparked by yet another foolhardy police raid, this time against an unlicensed
drinking club in Detroit’s Near West Side ghetto. Scores of black patrons were celebrating the
return of two soldiers from Vietnam when the racist decision came down from on
high to take all 82 people inside to jail. While the police were arranging for
paddy wagons to cart off their prey, a hostile crowd gathered. Some outraged residents threw rocks and
bottles at retreating police cars and began looting nearby stores. Before the violence ended five days later, 43
people were dead; half of the 33 fatalities were blacks shot by white police
officers.
Our bridge group
dined at Latitudes, off Route 12 near Ogden Dunes, before playing seven rounds
at Hagelbergs. I finished first, ahead
of Toni thanks to a 1,950 round with Brian Barnes. After Brian and I made a game, Dick threw in a
sacrifice bid to prevent us from winning the rubber. He went down three but bragged to his partner
that he’d saved them 200 points. He
tried it again on the next hand, and this time it backfired; I doubled, and he
went down five, costing him 900 points.
Then, for good measure we won the rubber on the fourth hand.
For Steve McShane’s
class Alex Cerajewski interviewed Gary and Terry Gault, who as
teenagers cruised Broadway near the Gary-Merrillville border.
In 1953, when he was six months old, Gary Gault’s family moved
from Wisconsin to Gary in hopes of finding better economic opportunities. Gary told me, “One brother came then the another brother came then a third brother
came. We were one of the first people to
live in Aetna.” Gary attended Aetna
Elementary and then Wirt, graduating in 1971.
Gary recalled, “Dad was
always working on his truck and would make me work on it, too. Kids in the
neighborhood all thought it was great seeing great big semi coming down the
street.” He played Little League, rode a bike everywhere, and walked the
railroad tracks to downtown Gary to go to the shows. In 1971 Gary’s dad moved
to Florida. Gary said, “I ain’t goin’ down there. I just got out of school, I got a girlfriend,
and just got a job at a car and truck wash where 12 and 20 came together in
Aetna.” Gary worked there about
five years before hiring in at U.S. Steel.
Gary met Terry in 1988 at Fuzzy Ducks, a bar located on Route
6, now named the Road House. Terry asked him for a dance. She was seven years younger and lived in
Porter. At the time Gary was in the
process of getting divorce and working at American Bridge. Terry didn’t hear
from Gary until three weeks later. He
was in a softball tournament but told her he’d been thinking about her all the
time. She was a waitress at Round the
Clock and he’d often come in to be with her.
Terry married Gary, had a son Erick, moved to Porter in 1990,
and had daughter Chrissie in 1992. Both she and Gary
recalled cruising Broadway as teenagers and observing drag racing on a
quarter-mile track behind Sammy’s Drive-In on Route 20. Gary added: “The police knew about it, too, but were cool about it.”
Terry recalled: “When I
was living with my mom I wasn’t allowed to have a car so when I moved out at 17
I got a 1973 Pontiac Grand Prix, followed by a 1978 baby blue Buick Riviera: I
loved to drive up and down Broadway just scoping out the guys. The one thing I never did was get in a car
with anyone else. You always stayed in your own car because people thought of
Gary as being dangerous. My Riviera I
bought on credit. I paid two hundred a
month for four years. Even though I took good care of it, I still blew two
engines on it.”
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