OT: Martin Luther King, Jr. comes to Grosse Pointe

Submitted by Don on

On a raw, cold night in mid-March of 1968, I drove with my mother to Grosse Pointe High School (now G.P. South) to attend a very unusual event in that community. Its uniqueness was evidenced by the small but very vocal group from Breakthrough, a radical-right political protest organization based in Detroit, who were on the sidewalks across from the school. Angry protest demonstrations of any political stripe were unheard of in that quiet, well-to-do suburb. This was going to be a strange night in Grosse Pointe.



What had drawn those angry demonstrators to that particular location on that night was the person who was scheduled to speak inside the school: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr..



In the eyes of Breakthrough's founder Donald Lobsinger, King was a Communist traitor and agitator who was sabotaging our military efforts in Vietnam. In the eyes of the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council, the group that had extended the invitation, King was a figure of major importance with particular relevance to the area, which had been convulsed by the Detroit riots the previous summer.



Having grown up in a very liberal household with a deep commitment to the cause of civil rights, our family sympathies with King and support for the civil rights movement was a distinctly minority opinion in the all-white and very conservative Grosse Pointe of that time.



I was only 15, and didn't know what to expect inside, but my mother was nervous about the possibility of violence, and that concern was echoed by the Grosse Pointe chief of police, who basically sat in King's lap as a protective measure during their car ride to the school.



The auditorium was packed, and King delivered a speech that concentrated on familiar themes that he had made the centerpiece of his campaign for civil rights since the 1950s. Breakthrough members interrupted King's speech several times with loud heckling from the crowd, but the most memorable occurence was when a young man began hectoring King about Vietnam. The atmosphere inside the auditorium was already very tense due to the previous outbursts, but King did something amazing to me: he stopped his speech, and invited the guy up onto the stage and gave him the microphone to state his views. He identified himself as a U.S. Naval veteran and made a short rambling statement stating his opposition to Communism. King's non-confrontational approach to him seemed to take the wind out of his sails, and defused what had been a potentially combustible moment.



The rest of the speech proceeded without further incident, and by the time we were making our way to our car, the demonstrators from Breakthrough were gone.



Just three weeks later, King was murdered in Memphis. That event was awful enough, but it was particularly so for my mother and me since we'd just seen him with our own eyes. The unrest his assassination sparked across the country was sadly predictable, and soon I was going to have a small personal taste of the depth of the local hatred for King.



One afternoon close to the end of the school year I was hanging out at the house of a girl I'd thought was pretty hot, and then the conversation randomly turned to King and the fact that I'd attended his speech in Grosse Pointe. She then announced that she was glad he'd been killed since he was a Communist traitor. I was no stranger to the casual racism that was routinely expressed by the people I grew up with in Grosse Pointe and Detroit, but to hear somebody who seemed perfectly nice and normal state their approval of murder so baldly and unapologetically to me was mind-boggling.



Her father then entered the room and then started ranting about how King was a subversive trying to overthrow the government for the Communists. I got the hell out of there since he seemed unhinged. She didn't seem quite so hot any more to me, either.



Given my family's interest in politics and support for the civil rights movement, I was very familiar with the resistance of southern politicians to integration, especially at the university level. Governor George Wallace's symbolic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" in 1962 in opposition to integrating Alabama was for my Missouri-born parents a symbol of the backwardness of racial attitudes that were part of their own early lives, and it seemed just plain crazy to me that anybody could be so opposed to allowing black Americans to attend the same universities as white Americans.

(Yes, there was plenty of virulent racism in the north back then too, but it didn't have nearly the amount of overt and unapologetic institutional support from politicians and elected officials that it did across the south.)



By that time I was also a young college football fan, and as my grandfather had attended UM during Yost's first four years, rooting for Michigan was natural in our house. While the UM teams then were still predominantly white, they did have notable black players, and I was well aware of the integrated Southern Cal teams of that era since the Big Ten played the Pac 8 in the Rose Bowl each year. It seemed ridiculous to me that it wasn't until the late 1960s and early '70s that the major teams in the south became integrated.





For basic info on King's Grosse Pointe speech:



http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/

http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/



For information about the integration of major college football:



http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/the-integratio…



http://www.teamspeedkills.com/2012/5/9/3008248/the-integration-of-footb…

Comments

JeepinBen

January 18th, 2016 at 11:42 AM ^

Thanks for sharing. On the topic, I heard about this book recently: http://www.amazon.com/Once-Great-City-Detroit-Story/dp/1476748381/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1453135200&sr=8-1&keywords=Once+in+a+great+city and while I've purchased it, I havne't had a chance to open it yet. My parents grew up in Southfield and Beverly Hills and while I was born in Chicago I went to Michigan and visiting my grandma, I have an affinity for the region. My wife is from the Detroit Burbs too. There's a lot of great national history there, as your story tells.

 

As David Maraniss captures it with power and affection, Detroit summed up America’s path to music and prosperity that was already past history.



It’s 1963 and Detroit is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America: Grandson of the first Ford; Henry Ford II; influential labor leader Walter Reuther; Motown’s founder Berry Gordy; the Reverend C.L. Franklin and his daughter, the amazing Aretha; Governor George Romney, Mormon and Civil Rights advocate; super car salesman Lee Iacocca; Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a Kennedy acolyte; Police Commissioner George Edwards; Martin Luther King. It was the American auto makers’ best year; the revolution in music and politics was underway. Reuther’s UAW had helped lift the middle class.



The time was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before and inventing the Mustang. Motown was capturing the world with its amazing artists. The progressive labor movement was rooted in Detroit with the UAW. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech there two months before he made it famous in the Washington march.



Once in a Great City shows that the shadows of collapse were evident even then. Before the devastating riot. Before the decades of civic corruption and neglect, and white flight. Before people trotted out the grab bag of rust belt infirmities—from harsh weather to high labor costs—and competition from abroad to explain Detroit’s collapse, one could see the signs of a city’s ruin. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world. Yet so much of what Detroit gave America lasts.

 

Don

January 18th, 2016 at 4:13 PM ^

but its construction frequently ripped the guts out of declining but otherwise viable black neighborhoods in central cities, including Detroit, where the Chrysler Freeway and Lafayette Park replaced Black Bottom and Paradise Valley.

jmblue

January 18th, 2016 at 3:31 PM ^

1963 seems a bit late.  Detroit's population peaked in 1950 at 1.85 million.  That decade the city lost 180,000 residents, and that doesn't even capture the extent of the white flight - the city's white population dropped by about 300,000 while the black population was growing.

The 1967 riots and election of Coleman Young six years later accelerated white flight out of the city, but it was well in evidence before then.  

 

 

 

Don

January 18th, 2016 at 5:18 PM ^

Yep. After my folks got divorced my mom, sister, and I lived on the east side of Detroit from summer of '65 to spring of '66. During that time the elections for Detroit Common Council (what city council was called then) were held and all the talk was about crime and people leaving the city. It was sort of depressing, and a relief when we moved back to the insular quietude of Grosse Pointe.

Don

January 18th, 2016 at 11:54 AM ^

as a guy with a future in national politics, and some were even saying he should run for President some day. The '67 riots destroyed his political career.

It was strange to grow up in Grosse Pointe and then drive along I-94 through Detroit and look up at the decrepit housing stock and other buildings that were easily visible from the freeway. In some ways it might as well have been another country entirely, and I guess it was.

Nothsa

January 18th, 2016 at 4:28 PM ^

I was born in southeast Michigan just a week after MLK was assasinated, so I'm half a generation younger than you. Still, my early 70's memories of Detroit were vibrant and colorful ones: as a kid perhaps I didn't appreciate the white flight, the economic disinvestment, the crime, and the complex cultural and racial issues that were splintering the city - and, to a lesser extent, the country. I struggle sometimes with the civil rights movement's unintended legacy: that this country is if anything more divided geographically and economically along old racial lines, even if those lines are more blurry than ever before.

GoBlueGladstone

January 19th, 2016 at 10:35 AM ^

Resistance to it, maybe. But to define the surge in conscientiousness of both blacks and whites and asserting the belief in manifesting long held rights universally cannot be blamed for the backlash and other  fault lines that came about. I was born 8 months after MLK was assasinated so we're the same age. I am from an interracial family so basically black for purposes of societal examination and remember people asking my mom for the lady of the house (my dad was a surgeon in Macomb County). Not that long ago. We straw bought our house because of restrictive covenenants despite my parent's both being professionals with excellent credit. Imagine what someone not so similarly situated went through. 

I too remember the excitement of going down to the D and watching the Tigers, Lions and Wings and seeing mixed crowds intermingle and commisserate which was much different than my hometown of Mount Clemens. The divisions are definitley worse and at the same time better. The polars are more diametrically opposed but the middle is closer than it's ever been. I remember as a freshman in Ann Arbor the relief of seeing other interracial couples and friends hanging out and how different it was than back home. And it's not like that was a lot, but it was more than anything I had ever seen. 

To wit, I don't know how striving for basic justice bears out responsibiltiy for the lines you delineated - I think those lines are hard drawn over the course of the country's history and 50 years of civil rights and the elimination of de facto racism is going to eliminated the stronger legacy of division which has a hundred some years head start. Many of the problems in Detroit  and the nation today were sewn way before the remedies to heal and help got underway. Can't blame the movement which only brought the strifes to light but we can constantly retool and rethink addressing them..

Nothsa

January 19th, 2016 at 7:34 PM ^

Your take is certainly right. I certainly didn't mean to imply that the movement wanted this outcome... nor do I think any reasonable person could have guessed that the backlash would result in the virtual abandonment of Detroit most spectacularly, but significant pockets of nearly every other American city as well. And indeed, many aspects of the Dream passages are reality today, at least for many people, and that's something we can be proud of. 

Ray

January 18th, 2016 at 8:23 PM ^

Great recollection; really appreciate you taking the time to post it.  I remember the murder of MLK as a time of no little sadness amongst my family (it was admittedly a pretty shitty year or year-and-a-half that way, between that, the riots the year before, and the assassination of RFK). 

Blue Durham

January 18th, 2016 at 9:36 PM ^

I've always enjoyed your posts. Pretty incredible to witness such an important part of history, in the making, so up close.

I am not nearly familiar with Detroit as you, but there does seem to be some parallels to where I grew up in South Jersey. Apparently Camden, NJ (across the Delaware River from Philadelphia and home of Campbell Soups) used to be a hell of a town back in the late '40s and '50s, but suffered a similar decline as Detroit did in the same era. There has been some re-vitalization in the last decade or so, particularly the riverfront.

But the parallels between the two cities has not escaped me.

LDNfan

January 19th, 2016 at 8:08 AM ^

Thank you Don...I grew up in Flint and in the 70's a trip to Detroit was as exciting for us as a trip overseas might be today. It was the big city, the lights, the energy, the edginess, the fancy dress, the art, the music and the creativity. Detroit had it ALL good and bad. 

Losing Detroit, its decline has been a harbinger of something lost for all in the region and beyond regardless of race and class. Detroit was far, far more important than most realise even today. 

xtramelanin

January 19th, 2016 at 8:27 AM ^

but with facts and not opinions.  civil rights and racism in an academic sense is very interesting in that it combined elements across party lines and ultimately achieved so many good things.   as don comments he was from a liberal household, that is a perfect example of strange bedfellows creating good or even great goals and results.

it was the democratic party that started the KKK in the south.  democrats were the party of jim crow laws and slavery.  all the KKK members elected to the senate were democrats.  democrats voted against and/or filibustered every single civil rights legislation until at least 1964 and only then switched when they realized they might never win another election if they didn't.  don rightly points out that george wallace, a dem, acted and stood as the party of segregation and against racial integration.  republicans voted for civil rights legislation in far greater percentages than democrats, and that is true even after the dems 'flipped' in the mid-60's. 

of course racism, even if generally more subtle in today's America' cuts across all gender, party, and race lines.  we as a country are better, but we are far from 'cured' of such a thing.  and don that is a great post.  i was just at a funeral up here yesterday talking with a GP south grad.  small world. 

XM

Don

January 19th, 2016 at 9:13 AM ^

The historic and entirely lamentable role of the old Democratic Party in the South in opposing civll rights and perpetuating Jim Crow is well-documented, but It's a bit more complex than simple party affiliation.

Focusing on the role of southern Democrats who actively opposed the legislation shouldn't obscure the fact that 46 Democratic Senators and 153 Democratic Representatives did vote for the legislation.

What was by far the greatest determinant in the voting for the Civil Rights legislation was the geographical home of the Senators and Representatives; the vast majority of Senators and Representatives from the south, regardless of party, voted against the legislation.

However, Democrats from the states of the Union voted for the legislation in greater percentage than Republicans from the Union; Democrats from the states of the Confederacy also voted for the civil rights legislation in greater percentages than Republicans from the Confederacy states.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-…

Regardless, it's the case that in spite of the fact that Republican votes were crucial in passing the legislation, once the acts were passed and signed into law by LBJ, the southern states immediately started voting Republican, starting in 1964 for Goldwater. They then voted heavily for Wallace, who ran as an Independent, not as a Democrat, in 1968. With only occasional incursions by southern Democratic candidates like Carter and Clinton, the south of the old Confederacy has turned increasingly Republican, especially at the state legislature level. Today, the Democratic Party across the South is as feeble as the Republican Party was in the south prior to the civil rights acts.

Wolverine fan …

January 19th, 2016 at 11:19 AM ^

Xtra's post is rife with errors, and your response highlights some of them. I won't go much further into everything wrong with it, but to imply that it was the righteous republicans rescuing black America from the racist democrats is misleading.

One example of the "flip" Xtra refers to: Strom Thurmond. He mounted the longest filibuster in senate history in opposition to the civil rights bill, and when it passed, flipped his party affiliation from democrat to republican. He knew the racists/statists in the south would never re-elect him as a democrat due to the changes enacted by LBJ and the democrats in congress. Enter the Southern Strategy, which has evolved into the political landscape we live in today.

Hopefully this isn't too political for the board, but MLK's life and death has a lot to do with politics.

xtramelanin

January 19th, 2016 at 12:59 PM ^

it was intended to highlight the odd bedfellows of both major parties and most defintely not intended to say that one party is racist-free.  also, there is nothing wrong with the facts i cited and it hardly proves your point to mention a single person who late in his career repented from his racisim and switched parties as some master strategy.  remember, MLK was a republican.

out of respect for the board and comity amongst us all i'll cut it off there other than to say, i know of what i speak - in my household we've got XtraMelanin (said with a smile, not as a challenge).

 

Wolverine fan …

January 19th, 2016 at 2:37 PM ^

Agreed that I misread portions of what you said. But that doesn't change the fact that the democratic party didn't actually start the KKK, per se, or that Wallace ran as an independent, and that region had more to do with the bill passing than party affiliation. (As pointed out by Don.)  Strom Thurmond switched his party to secure his seat due to the racists in the south finding their new home within the republican party.The chair of the RNC publicly apologized to the NAACP a few years back for completely igonring the black vote in the south for a couple decades, so I think it's pretty accurate to say that the Republican party cared very little as a whole about anything but their white voter base for quite some time. This was by all means a calculated maneuver, and is commonly referred to as the "Southern Strategy." MLK was a southern republican in the same way that Strom Thurmond was a southern democrat. They were aligned with the political party that shared or allowed their views. When the parties flipped the scripts after 64, Thurmond and the rest of the "statists" had to find their new home.

And Putin, I wish you would have knocked that jackass to the ground.

xtramelanin

January 19th, 2016 at 3:25 PM ^

and though i have some disagreements with your other comments, it is more important that we have sports talk here and not break out into some donnybrook of politics/religion/etc.   having lightly touched that rail, i will step off of it.

 

SalvatoreQuattro

January 19th, 2016 at 4:19 PM ^

whom were Democrats. The GOP was the party of Lincoln and carpetbaggers and the KKK directed their rage at them in addition to blacks. Yes, the Democratic Party may not have officially started the KKK, but there is no doubt that the KKK's actions greatly assisted the rise of the Democratic Party to dominance in the post-war South.

The Democrats century long dominace on the South was due in large part to the activities of the KKK and the White League.

Xtramelanin's initial post was not entirely accurate, but there is no denying that the Democratic Party benefitted immensely from the terrorism of the KKK.  From terrorizing blacks to evicting white Northerners from office the KKK and the White League steadily eradicated from Southern life the means of blacks to protect their legal rights.The 1876 election where the Democrats essentially gave away the presidency so they could re-impose white supremacy in the South surely is one of the most shameful acts in American history.The GOP lost it's soul in that bargain with the devil. That signified in reality that it was no longer the party of Lincoln.

remdog

January 22nd, 2016 at 6:15 PM ^

except for the last part -

<i>The GOP lost it's soul in that bargain with the devil. That signified in reality that it was no longer the party of Lincoln.</i>

Unfortunately, this is the mainstream narrative and a false one.  A case can be made that both major parties have no soul.  But when it comes to race, the party that advocates color blindness under the law and adherence to MLK's "dream" is still the party of Lincoln.

Then again,  I'm an independent.  And this is a sports blog not a political one.

 

 

Hotel Putingrad

January 19th, 2016 at 1:18 PM ^

I literally almost knocked him over once. He was visiting his son at Vanderbilt, and the kid, whom I didn't know personally, lived in the same residence hall. One glorious spring Sunday morning, I turned the corner into the lobby a little too hard and almost floored the oldest living Senator. Of course, if I had known who it was ahead of time, I definitely would have knocked him off his feet. I don't remember exactly what the old man said in response but I remember it being not very genteel.

bjk

January 19th, 2016 at 7:16 PM ^

among others, has written a book about the re-enslavement of black americans in the Deep South after the collapse of tepid federal reconstruction efforts at nation-building efforts. The continued practice of involuntary servitude was finally addressed by FDR's Attorney General Francis Biddle's Circular no. 3591, which directed the feds to prosecute peonage offenses under laws that had gone unused since the Reconstruction Era. Based on the announcement date of December 12, 1941, it is hard to see this as a purely humanitarian concern apart from it's function as war propaganda.

I think a similar situation arises in the MLK era as US efforts to push the US neocolonial regime of indebtedness and service economy on Africa through AID and local ambassadors was beset by (literally) inflammatory images from the US Deep South. At this point, with a global empire including Africa on the line, it is no surprise that MLK and other organizers started to find help from the feds in Oxford, MS and Tuscaloosa and Selma, AL.

Any propaganda value MLK offered to the high-level interests of the USG would have come to an end with MLK's "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 4, 1967. He charactered the thoughts of his critics -- "Peace and civil rights don't mix." This was the reaction in editorials in the NYT (pdf) on 4-7-67 and the WaPo on 4-6-67, as well as those of the NAACP and Ralph Bunche. The WaPo title, "A Tragedy," contains almost an element of threat. MLK was dead a year later.

bjk

January 19th, 2016 at 6:07 PM ^

before 1964 were governing coalitions composed of disparate components; this is a consequence of the winner-take-all non-proportional system of apportioning representation under the US system.

As a sign of this inconsistency in each party, the roll call for the 1964 Voting Rights Act, HR 7151 was: R: Aye 136, No 35; D: Aye: 152, No 91; and the roll call for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, HR 6400 was: R: Aye 111, No 23 and D: Aye 221, No 62.

This inconsistency was part of what made the party platform in presidential election years so significant and contentious.

When Goldwater sought to expand the Republican voter base in the Deep South by cashing in on white supremist backlash to the the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the 1964 presidential election (this was an early abortive trial run of Nixon's "Southern Strategy" of 1968), he met spirited resistance to the idea of turning the Republican Party into an overtly conservative party from Mit Romney's dad, George, governer of Michigan. Romney abstained from campaigning for Goldwater, and later wrote a letter (scroll to end of article for full text) to him on December 21, 1964 detailing his concerns about the nascent "Southern Strategy"; it was published in the NYT on 12-26-66. Romney's feelings about a whites-only strategy are summarized below:

The real challenge for us lies in the expansion of voter support for the Republican party in all parts of the country, urban or rural, North or South, colored or white. Without common dedication to this fundamental, our rehash of 1964 positions may become of interest only to the historians of defunct political institutions.

A different kind of cross-party split is emerging in modern times, after the Democratic Party moved under the Clintons to re-establish its status as a fully establishment party with financial contributor lists increasingly similar to those of the Republican Party (eg D, R). This new split is highlighted by the roll call for the (Justin)Amash Amendment, H-Amdt. 413 to HR 2397 (Defense Appropriations) on 7-27-13, immediately post-Edward-Snowden era. The amendment sought to end NSA mass data collection on US citizens without warrant, and failed by 15 votes. The vote was R: Aye 94 No 134 and D: Aye 111 No 83.

bhinrichs

January 20th, 2016 at 4:57 AM ^

Thank you, Don.  A really fascinating account!

King was almost inhumanly calm, rational, and gracious in the face of difficult, boorish, and confrontational situations.  I don't know how he did it.

Just look for the Youtube videos (3 parts) when he was on the Mike Douglas show in 1967.  He was so unflappable, so thoughtful, so historically knowledgeable, and so directly engaging with the aggressive (and naive) questions of Douglas and guest Tony Martin.  And humble to boot.  

He has an insightful comment noting that some who aggressively supported the protest movement in Selma did so because they opposed the violence of Bull Conner, rather than because they were in favor of civil rights for African Americans.  So motives were crucial to ascertain.

And listen to the questions he is asked.  They sound surprisingly (and sadly) similar to many asked of the anti-invastion/anti-war crowd during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq post 9/11. 

VCavman24

January 21st, 2016 at 11:38 PM ^

As a recent Grosse Pointe South grad I knew that MLK came and spoke at South and I have seen a couple of photos from his speech at South.  Last year our principal even presented a chair he sat in.  However, I have never heard a first-hand account of anyone who actually was present for his speech, so thank you for that.  This was very interesting.

MDubs

January 22nd, 2016 at 9:53 AM ^

Thank you for sharing this story.  I am especially interested in King's strategy of ceding the mic to let the young man share his views (however incoherent they may be) and then proceding to just continue his speech.  That's a balls-hang-low kinda move.  Good luck finding a politician today who would do that (oh wait!...hi Bernie!)  Much respect to him.  We lost him too soon.  

Danwillhor

January 23rd, 2016 at 12:36 AM ^

the part about the girl and her father sounds a lot like the rhetoric we hear about a modern public figure. The Socialist, Muslim, Kenyan, Nazi-Zombie, Anti-Christ, NWO agent guy.....we love to take out hatred to illogical extremes.