September 1, 2014
When
I was a boy in the mid 1960's, the much anticipated highlight of
every summer was the annual father/son bus trip to Tiger Stadium in
Detroit to watch the Tigers play baseball. Every year a deluxe coach
would be chartered from the Mercury Bus Line, and the wives and
mothers would bid us a fond farewell, as our dads were heralded for
providing us this day of wholesome entertainment. And we sons knew
enough to keep quiet about the way some of the dads and sons actually
behaved. It was a father/son bonding experience to be sure, but not
in the way the wives and mothers understood it. Most of our dads
were World War II veterans, and even those who were not found it easy
to fall into the spirit of military like camaraderie that ruled the
day. On one occasion, that camaraderie included a dad "casualty"
carried out of the ballpark dead drunk by dads on each elbow in the
third inning of the second game of a doubleheader. His comrades used
the two and a half hour bus ride home to sober him up as much as
possible, and passed this off to his missus as "something he ate
at the ballpark." To keep something like this from happening
again, the rule for the day became single games only.
How
could something like this happen? Well, at the front center aisle of
the bus, there was a horse trough filled with ice and a spectacular
selection of beer and soft drinks. The beer was for the dads of
course, and the pop for the boys, though among the older boys this
line of demarcation would sometimes become somewhat blurred. I
remember one trip home from the ballpark when some of the older
brothers among us had snitched beer from the trough, and the
combination of the roll of the road, the cigar smoke, and the diesel
fumes at the back of the bus resulted in several young men vomiting a
combination of hotdogs, other ballpark treats and beer out the back
windows. Seeing the windshield washers and wipers activated on the
cars in back of us gave surreal testimony to the spew coming from our
vehicle. And while many of the dads puffing cigars and playing poker
were blissfully or willfully ignorant, others, like mine, were more
aware of what was going on, and suggested to us younger fellows that
perhaps this wasn't something that should be related to Mom when we
got home. And since we all wanted to go again next year, we said
nothing to our mothers, and the dads expressed their collective pride
in what well behaved gentlemen their sons all were -- and they got
away with this stuff for years. It's not like they were the
"Greatest Generation" for nothing.
The
one interruption that occurred in this annual ritual came in 1967.
Usually, weekend games were preferred, and on the weekend of July 22
was a Saturday game with the always hated Yankees. Perfect. But the
advance sale for Yankee games was always swift, and no acceptable
place remained in the ballpark for a group our size. Sunday was
ruled out because it was a doubleheader; this was the year after the
incident related above, and the doubleheader rule was invoked. The
game chosen instead was the coming Tuesday night contest with the
Orioles because they were defending World Champions, and Denny McLain
was set to pitch for the Tigers. I cannot begin to describe the
excitement I felt as I anticipated seeing McLain's perfect form and
high leg kick result in fastball after fastball blown by the likes of
Frank and Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, Paul Blair and the rest of
the Baltimore line-up. And likewise, I cannot describe the rising
sense of dread, and the ultimate disappointment, as the news reached
us by Monday that the riot we had heard of vaguely on Sunday had
escalated to such an extent that the Tuesday Tigers game was canceled
-- and so was our bus trip.
The Detroit
Riot, or 12th Street Riot,
as it was known more locally, began in the early morning hours of
July 23, when Detroit Police from the 10th Precinct raided a party at
a "blind
pig"
at the corner of 12th and Clairmont, upstairs in the Economy
Printing
building. Raids were common in these establishments, usually netting
a dozen persons or so, but on this particular night, a party in
progress for two returning Vietnam vets swelled the crowd to some 82
people. After arresting and detaining those present, the police
spent an uneasy and tense hour waiting for backup and additional
paddy wagons to arrive from adjoining precincts, and during this time
the crowd gathered outside grew to over 200. Amid catcalls from the
crowd, rocks and bottles were being hurled at the building, and
randomly at police, and as the last police vehicle pulled away from
the scene "...someone
from the crowd picked up a bottle and launched it high into the air.
Like the home crowd at a football game watching a last chance hail
Mary pass, the mob bridled as the bottle arced passed a streetlight,
began its decent and crashed right through the rear window of the
last police cruiser which wisely kept on going. Like scoring the
winning touchdown with time running out, the crowd went berserk. The
Great Rebellion
had begun."
Due
to a local news blackout, even those of us outstate in places like
Alma were blissfully unaware of what was going on down in Detroit
that Sunday morning. At one o'clock, the Tigers and the Yankees
began their doubleheader as usual, and, as usual, I had the 1940's
RCA radio/phonograph in my bedroom tuned in to the Tigers' flagship
station, WJR, in anticipation of the afternoon of baseball that was
to follow. Mel Stottlemyre beat Mickey Lolich 4 to 2 in the first
game, and the Tigers earned a split by beating Fritz Peterson 7 to 3
in the second game on home runs by Jim Landis and Willie Horton, and
a two run single by winning pitcher Johnny Hiller. The first
indication I had that something was amiss in Detroit was when
legendary Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell announced near the end of
game 2 that "due to a disturbance in the area" the crowd
present should disperse towards home rather than linger at the
customary neighborhood watering holes like Nemo's and the Lindell AC.
Tiger
Stadium
was at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in those days. All you
had to say was "The Corner" and everybody knew which one
you meant. Trumbull ran parallel to 12th Street (which is now Rosa
Parks Boulevard), and Cochrane, which ran along the west side of the
ballpark, was two blocks from 12th. As the afternoon wore on, the
"disturbance in the area" was spreading quickly, and the
smoke rising from the arson induced fires was rising ominously above
the center field bleachers by the time the crowd of 34,000 filed out
of the ballpark and headed quickly for home.
There
was a legend that persisted among Tigers fans from the days after the
riot that Willie Horton, an all star Tigers player who grew up in the
12th Street neighborhood around the ballpark, had gone into the
streets in uniform after the second game that day and had persuaded
the rioting crowd to spare the ballpark from destruction. This
legend had pretty much receded into Tigers folklore when Willie, many
years after the fact, explained the truth behind it. He had indeed
gone out into the rioting mob that day, and had stood on the hood of
a car and had unsuccessfully tried to talk the rioters into
dispersing. In this article by MLB beat writer Jason Beck, "Willie
Horton's heroics went far beyond the diamond,"
we learn that the real Willie is that rare person who actually
exceeds and transcends his sports legend:
Many
athletes over the years have talked about Detroit being a city on the
rebound and have admirably done their part to help. Horton was one of
the few who was on the ground during the city's most trying time. He
still can't quite explain why he took to the streets on July 23,
1967, with fires and looting taking hold of the town. He couldn't
expect to stop it, but he had to try.
That
night became a footnote to what ended up as one of America's worst
weeks of unrest, but to Horton it was the start of a lifelong
commitment to being a city advocate as well as a resident.
"Maybe,"
Horton wrote with Kevin Allen years later in his biography, The
People's Champion, "that
was the night I embraced my community for the first time as an adult.
"Any
time a city breaks out in something like that, it's how you perceive
it," Horton
told MLB.com in an interview a few years ago.
"A lot of people on the outside don't know what a city is going
through. It's the people internal who know what's really going on...
"It
started years ago. It just triggered off that night at the blind pig.
Many years ago it wasn't anything hidden. [Authorities] just misused
black people, and it just pushed itself on people."
The
unrest this August in Ferguson, Missouri, calls to mind the words of
Willie Horton concerning the situation in Detroit some 47 years ago.
Once again human ugliness came out of hiding. Authorities just
misused black people, and it just pushed itself on people. The
deeper reasons behind the unrest and the violence in Ferguson are
being explored endlessly in print elsewhere, and that's not the
purpose behind me relating this childhood tale of mine. Suffice it
to say that as long as black people and other minorities remain
economically disadvantaged and segregated from the opportunity the
rest of us have to achieve success and prosperity in America, then
Jim Crow remains alive and well, and we should expect that the
frustration and anger inherent in this will raise its ugly head in
violence. And the more these opportunities in America diminish for
all of us, then the more this will exacerbate the decay in the urban
areas of the nation, and this will result in authorities misusing
those who turn to crime and violence as a means of survival. And
when the population affected is predominantly black, then it is black
people who will be misused and abused. That was true in Detroit in
1967, and it's true in Ferguson today.
What
Willie Horton refers to when he says, "It started years ago,"
is the boom and bust cycles that provided the growing (and shrinking)
pains of Detroit in the 20th century. The city grew from 285,000
in 1900 to a peak of 1.8 million in 1950,
and has since fallen to under
700,000 today. Two world wars opened the way for both poor
southern whites and
blacks to come to Detroit with the promise of a new prosperity that
would overcome finally the failure of post Civil War Reconstruction
in the South. With the vision of a new start and a new life in the
industrial hub of the nation had come hope, and with the people would
come the prejudices and bigotry of racial hatred that would keep the
potential of this hope from ever being fully realized. The boom of
World War I and the roar of the automobile driven 20's would give way
to the bust of the Great Depression. And the ensuing explosion of
World War II would make Detroit the "Arsenal of Democracy"
and once again open the human floodgates to southern economic
refugees both black and white. The tensions and pressures present in
wartime Detroit would explode into violence in 1943, and result in
the other
bloody (and more forgotten) Detroit riot
of the century. After the war, the auto companies diversified by
closing outdated plants and factories in the city and moving into new
facilities in the suburbs. Management and the white union rank and
file largely followed. Due to rampant redlining
in both the city and the suburbs, blacks became essentially trapped
in the economic and crime ridden wasteland that the inner city had
evolved into, and the stage was set for the explosion that finally
took place in late July, 1967.
The
aftermath of the riot was thus summed up by former Detroit Mayor
Coleman Young in 1994:
The
heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a
hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings.
The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation,
mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs,
earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes,
mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment
dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried
out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as
fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been
prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totaling twenty-two thousand
in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half
the year remaining after the summer explosion, the outward population
migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit
eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.
The
summer of 1967 gave way to the fall. Given the uncertainty of the
situation in Detroit following the riot, it was decided that no
attempt would be made to reschedule our trip to the ballpark. When
school started in the fall, the missed game became a major topic of
conversation among those of us so disappointed by it, and I remember
one of the older boys commenting that, "...it was bullshit that
we got screwed out of the best day of the summer by a bunch of
asshole niggers in Detroit." As this rather narrow minded and
selfish perspective made it's way through the younger generation, it
did not go unnoticed by the older one. And while it wasn't that
unusual for those of this generation to use the "n" word
freely and perhaps even often, and to tell certain jokes and stories
that were forbidden in the polite company of their world let alone
ours, they most certainly didn't like it when their sons did this. And
they called us on it. Apparently, they didn't mean anything by
their behavior and we did, and they believed collectively that they
had a point to prove to us, and this is how they did it:
As
it turned out, one of the motives behind the annual pilgrimage we
made to Tiger Stadium was to give us white bread small town white
kids a little exposure to the vast cultural differences that were
Detroit to us. It was a fascinating place, and on the bus we would
go through what seemed like an endless corridor of concrete and
freeway traffic and weird surroundings to come out in a strange and
wondrous place that was populated largely by black people. Prior to
entering the stadium, we would wander around the Corktown
neighborhood that the ballpark was in, buy snacks at the little
grocery store on Trumbull, and get a bag of peanuts from the vendor
in the bright orange coat hawking them across the corner from the
ballpark. It was always amazing to me that everyone was so friendly.
Once in the ballpark, the Tiger Stadium crew took great pride in
making everyone feel welcome, the service was personal and
outstanding, and the overall effect was to make tens of thousands of
strangers feel like family. Throughout the day, the majority of the
people we saw and interacted with were black, and the experience was
extremely positive. In the racially charged times in which I grew
up, a ballgame in Detroit was an excellent and fun way to teach basic
human relations, and the dads were determined that a riot wasn't
going to undermine this.
Plans
were made to go to a game sooner rather than later in 1968, and so on
the first Saturday after school was out, June 8, we found ourselves
on the bus and headed for Detroit to see the Tigers take on the
Cleveland Indians. Mickey Lolich against "Sudden" Sam
McDowell. Not bad. The trip to Detroit went as usual. It was a
bright, sunny day and we stopped at the rest area near Brighton and
enjoyed our customary pregame picnic of fried chicken. From here it
was on to Detroit and Tiger Stadium in great anticipation of the day
that lie ahead.
The
first thing out of the ordinary that day was when we boys caught that
awesome first glimpse of the playing field looking out along the
third baseline. We began instinctively making our way towards the
upper deck, and our customary place above the Tigers' dugout, when
one of the dads whistled and motioned us to go the other way, and we
began making our way towards the left field corner. This was
strange, but Tiger Stadium had no bad seats except those behind the
posts, so we were all good with this unexpected change of venue.
We
soon found ourselves in left field, in the lower deck, and became
aware that our block of forty seats or so were in the midst of the
predominantly black cheering section for left fielder Willie Horton.
This proved a little awkward at first. We weren't the only white
people in the section, but we were the only group of forty or more
small town fathers and sons, and we did stand out. There was a black
man in a plaid shirt wearing a tattered Tigers cap seated next to our
group, and as we moved past him to find our seats, one of the dads
said, "We're down here from Alma to see the game today. We're
all Willie Horton fans, and we wanted these boys to get the chance to
see their hero close up." That was all it took. And it was
true enough. I have never met a Tigers fan who was not a Willie
Horton fan, and these Willie Horton fans were largely folks from the
neighborhood around the ballpark. Some knew Willie personally, and
most attended games regularly, and we found this to be an exciting
part of city life that we could relate to. As fellow Willie Horton
fans, we suddenly found ourselves a part of this extended family of
Tigers fans, and it felt pretty special.
During
batting practice, Willie shagged balls in left field and would
occasionally toss one up into the stands to the delight of the kids
waiting for them. We realized soon enough that the love the fans
showered down upon him was clearly reciprocated. We white boys
talked baseball with the black boys and found it to be a universal
language. In fact, this is where I first heard the legend of Willie
out on the streets during the riot saving the ballpark. The white
dads made a point of striking up friendly conversations with the
black dads, and I noticed one of them exchange cigars with the man in
the plaid shirt and well worn cap, and they laughed and chatted
amiably as they shared each others smokes. I saw one of our dads
come back from the beer vendor with the limit of two and hand one to
his black neighbor. The black dads and white dads took turns doing
this throughout the game, and nobody ended up needing to be carried
from the stadium that day, though there would have been lots of
comrades to do so had it become necessary. Black or white, it's not
like they were the "Greatest Generation" for nothing.
It
was a great day and a great game. Lolich beat McDowell 3 to 1 and
pitched a complete game, which was not so unusual then. We joined
the Horton faithful in their personalized chant of "Hit
that ball, Wille!"
and Willie responded with an RBI single that made our section of the
park go particularly berserk. And when Willie trotted back out to
left field at the end of the inning, we were standing and cheering
with everybody else, and we felt like we belonged because we did.
In
1968, Willie Horton led the Tigers in hitting. They would win the
American League Pennant and go on to take the World Series over the
highly touted St. Louis Cardinals in one of the great classic
comebacks of all time. And it was Willie Horton who made the pivotal
play that turned the tide of the series to Detroit when he threw Lou
Brock out at the plate in game 5. Often called the "the
biggest defensive play in Tiger's history,"
it allowed the Tigers to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and
after being down 3 games to 1, they would go on to take the series,
as Lolich would out duel Bob Gibson in a game 7 that was one for the
ages. Little more than a year after Detroiters to had taken to the
streets in violence, Detroiters would once again take to the streets
but this time in jubilation. This time it would be to cheer Willie
Horton and the Tigers in a parade down Woodward Avenue to celebrate
not merely a World Series victory, but the victory of the city itself
over the adversity of the year before.
The
1968 baseball season didn't heal the wounds that had resulted in the
Detroit Riot of 1967, but it sure did go a long way toward easing the
pain, and it played a huge role in awakening both blacks and whites
to the reality that if the city was going to survive and heal, it was
going to take cooperation and teamwork to make it happen, not strife
and division. A bunch of small town, outstate dads and sons learned
this lesson at a baseball game in Detroit, and in retrospect, I'm
sure the black dads at the park that day picked up on what our dads
were trying to do and reciprocated. And the black sons present
learned the same valuable lesson we did. In the reaction of their
sons to the Detroit Riot of 1967, our dads saw a reflection of their
own racist attitudes and it was pretty ugly. They decided to "put
the teach on us," to use an old baseball expression, and I
think they learned something in the process themselves. Like Willie
would later say about that night of July 23, 1967, "Maybe that
was the night I embraced my community for the first time as an
adult." In the aftermath of the riot, I think a lot of folks
both black and white stepped up and did the same, and my story merely
relates one experience of how this worked in practice.
Somewhere
in the midst of the white flight and the loss of wealth and prestige,
and in spite of the fact that even Motown
left town, Detroit found its soul again. It is a rebound city that
survived a week in July 47 years ago and the ensuing aftermath, and
though reinventing itself in this post industrial age remains a work
in progress, it is a work that is getting done because people of
goodwill of all colors are hard at work at making it happen. Tiger
Stadium is long gone, but Comerica Park is full most games, and all
summer long, the millions who visit the new ballpark file past a
statue paying tribute to Willie Horton -- Willie Horton, who is
neither gone nor forgotten in Detroit. He remains that rarest of
heroes whose feet are not made of clay, prompting the late
sportswriter for the Detroit Free Press, Joe Falls, to aptly observe
that "Willie
Horton is Detroit. Detroit is Willie Horton." And that
speaks well of both. Greektown with it's casino and great
restaurants, and the restored Fox Theater district with Comerica Park
and the Lions' Ford Field, give visitors a taste of the old Detroit
and a vision of the new Detroit that is rising from its ashes. And
Detroit remains a lively city of great warmth and friendly Midwestern
hospitality, which takes out of towners who are used to it's hard
nosed reputation, and image as a symbol of urban blight, quite by
surprise. Detroit has it's own gritty charm. Ask the lot attendant
how much he wants to park your car and he may say, "Twenty
dollars. Thirty if you want it to be here when you get back." It's an
old joke. I can remember when in the lots around Tiger
Stadium it was three dollars to park and five if you wanted your car
back. Detroit still has issues with crime and poverty, and there are
areas that it's smart to stay away from, but downtown people want to
earn your money, not steal it.
When
a city's population falls to less than half of what it once was, and
the "plain damn money" is gone, the decayed infrastructure,
abandoned neighborhoods and ruined buildings of the old city make for
a bleak and surreal landscape. In more recent years, this feature of
Detroit has been exploited and used as a drawing card for those filming
movies
like RoboCop
and Brick
Mansions
about the dystopian, post apocalyptic world that one day may become
more reality than science fiction for the rest of the nation, just as
it already has in Detroit. The Detroit Riot of 1967 lives as an
historical symbol of this economic apocalypse that has already struck
industrial Detroit, and the resurgence of a more humble, and yet in
many ways more vibrant Detroit, gives evidence to the truth that this
kind of thing that terrifies and terrorizes other cities in the
United States can be survived, and even overcome.
Maybe
the lesson of Detroit today is that the future is only as dystopian
as we make it -- or allow it to be. And maybe the lesson of Detroit
in 1967 is that sometimes a city has to lose its mind if it's going
to find its heart. That heart was demonstrated on the baseball
field, and the way the story is usually told, it was the city that
came to reflect the heart of their 1968 World Champion Tigers. In
truth, and as demonstrated in the person of Detroit's own Willie
Horton, it was the Tigers who came to reflect the heart of the
beleaguered city they played for, and so prophetically came back
against all odds -- just as the cream that is the heart of Detroit
continues to rise slowly through the dirty and sour milk bottle of an
earlier and more unhappy time. And, as an aside, the fans who show
up these days at Comerica Park to express their disappointment in the
currently foundering 2014 Tigers do so because this team of
overpriced and overrated players, picked by most to win it all, go to
live in some place they think is better when the season is done, and
their hearts just aren't in the city at all. They just don't get it.
In
light of what has happened in Ferguson, Missouri, that is the purpose
behind me relating this childhood tale of mine. Once this time of
tribulation has passed, will they get it? Once the anger gives way
to sorrow, will they gather together in community and overcome and
forgive -- move forward and take their future back from the violence
of the present? I suspect they will. In the aftermath, there will
be the many who will rise up and embrace their community for the
first time as adults, and they will take it back from the few. As
long as humans live in a society in which some hold authority over
others, there will be those who rebel against it and those who abuse
it and it will lead to tragedy. For every police officer who kills
an unarmed suspect, there are countless others who diffuse similar
situations, and they don't make the news doing this. Police are not
the messianic heroes of 9/11 anymore than they are the despotic
villains of the Michael
Brown incident,
and just as in the Algiers
Motel incident
in Detroit in 1967, the tensions and trials and traumas of the
streets can lead to tragedy and horror. Like the rest of us, those
in authority are human, and those who rise to the occasion and do the
job correctly are those who put their humanity ahead of their
authority, and those who don't commit atrocities.
In
the end, it's not legislation or punishment and retribution that
fixes human relations, it's compassion, maturity and love. It's
having the faith in oneself, the faith in others, and the faith in
God necessary to embrace our communities as adults. Jesus' most
simple command to us is that we love one another, yet it has proven
to be the most difficult thing to accomplish. And it brings us so
much pain.
Willie
Horton is a devout man and a leader in Detroit who embraces his faith
as he does his community:
Happiness
and joy surround my life these days. Along with working for the
Detroit Tigers, I have the privilege of confessing the name of my
Lord Jesus Christ. I find my daily strength in God’s Word. I have
found a peace in my life. I’m closer to my team, my family and my
God. My life seems complete.
Perhaps
they need to hear this in Ferguson. I know they're Cardinals fans
there, but I think they can relate as well as Detroiters, and all
folks everywhere, to the simple fact that if we would truly love God
and one another as He would have us do; if we would share the wealth
and the knowledge of this love in such a way that the equality we all
talk about as the ultimate American virtue would become the ultimate
American reality, then there wouldn't be any more violence like in
Detroit in 1967, or in Ferguson in 2014. Happiness and joy would
surround our lives in those days, and our lives would seem more
complete. And maybe one day those who would follow us into this
kinder and gentler world would point to us and say, "It's not
like they were the 'Greatest Generation' for nothing."
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