Sweet Thunder Page 2

  Upon their arrival in Detroit, Leila reconnected with husband Walker. He was delighted to see his family together again. He ushered them into a modest home on McComb Avenue, and Leila’s daughters began helping around the house as much as they could. Walker hoped for a son.

  In the ensuing weeks, Leila and her daughters—like so many newcomers—were simply stunned by the pace of Detroit: booming construction cranes; Model T’s swerving around corners; police officers with pinched faces wielding billy clubs upon the homeless. Reinhold Niebuhr—whose writings would later become influential reading for the seminary student Martin Luther King Jr.—was a young minister living in Detroit at the time. Niebuhr also found the city bewildering: “A city which is built around a productive process … is really a kind of hell,” he felt. “Thousands in this town are really living in torment while the rest of us eat, drink, and make merry. What a civilization!”

  Walker Smith, Jr.—born May 3, 1921—would spend his youngest years in this Northern environment. He was proudly named Walker, after his father. They called him Junior. (Robinson’s birthplace would come, in later years, to be claimed by both the citizens of Michigan and Georgia, although Sugar Ray himself preferred Detroit.) The infant child barely saw his father, however, as Walker Sr. was now working two jobs, his second on a sewer line. After her son’s birth Leila went back to work as a maid at the city’s Statler Hotel. The young child was left, for the most part, in the care of his two sisters, Marie and Evelyn. The sisters spoiled the boy by rocking him, giving him sweets, fussing over him in the cold weather. Little Walker, however, would retain vivid impressions of his father from sweet and slow Sunday afternoons: The father would get dressed up, stand in front of the mirror, cackle with confidence in Junior’s direction. “He was a good dresser,” the son would recall of his father, and his description might have summed up the evolution of his own future sartorial bent. “Conservative, but stylish. He liked dark suits—blues, grays, and browns. And I can remember that in the summer he wore two-tone shoes and a white Panama hat.” The father’s Model T entranced little Walker. He furtively explored the machine, once playing the part of stowaway: “One time I hid in the rumble seat of his Ford. When I hopped out, he had to drive me home. He didn’t like that because he had to use more gas. And that meant he was wasting money.”

  Few if any Southern migrant families could foresee what was about to happen inside the borders of Detroit in the mid-1920s. The combustion of Henry Ford’s automobiles was one thing; human combustion quite another. The crowding of migrants—and foreign immigrants—meant a housing squeeze. There was an unstoppable flow of families seeking opportunities, seen hustling daily from the trains down at Michigan’s Central Terminal—and it started to cause painful ruptures.

  Many residents of the Black Bottom area suffered from high rents, inadequate medical care, and brutish police tactics. “Black because we lived there, Bottom because that’s where we were at,” Walker Sr.’s only son would later lament about the Black Bottom district. And what slowly began to creep into the city’s soul was Henry Ford’s xenophobia.

  In the summer of 1921, Ford—whose genius seemed strictly business-oriented—had approximately five hundred thousand copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion printed for local reading pleasure. It was a thinly veiled treatise attacking Jews, full of anti-Semitic vitriol. Bigots were the only ones who got pleasure from reading it. Ford’s narrow racial views on social matters—at variance from the needs of his labor-hungry auto plants—were hardly unexpected, since they echoed much of the national discourse. President Woodrow Wilson had brought a nasty segregationist attitude with him to the White House: Negro civil servants lost hundreds of jobs with little or no explanation; the color line in social venues in the nation’s capital was tightened even more. Actions—or inaction—from the top tiers of the government had a way of filtering downward. There were newspaper accounts of racial hatred across the country.

  In May of 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a Negro youth, Dick Rowland, went into a downtown building to use the bathroom. A white seventeen-year-old girl claimed he attacked her. Rowland denied guilt but was quickly arrested and taken to jail. A group of local blacks armed themselves to help the sheriff protect Rowland from a possible lynching. Enraged, local whites went on a rampage, galloping through the Greenwood section of the city—known as “the Negro Wall Street of America”—firing weapons at random and setting fire to buildings. Some of the fleeing blacks were gunned down from behind. A. C. Jackson was a physician who bravely stayed to give medical care to the wounded that first night. On the second day, with his home surrounded by a sneering mob, Jackson stepped outside, the smell of ash still in the air. “Here I am,” the frightened man said. “Take me.” Two bullets then ripped into his chest, killing him. Before it was over, at least one hundred blacks had been killed (some accounts cite three times that number), and over a thousand homes and businesses torched. An investigation eventually exonerated shoeshine man Rowland of all charges. Not a single white person was ever arrested. Eighteen months later came another horror down South: Believing a Negro had raped a white woman in Sumner, Florida, white residents sought vengeance in nearby Rosewood, an all-black town. At least seventeen blacks were murdered. Those who saved themselves had fled with a few meager possessions into nearby woods.

  In Detroit, little Walker Smith and his family soon found themselves living in a cauldron of social unease. On Christmas Eve of 1923 the Ku Klux Klan held a rally around Detroit’s City Hall. They sang carols holding the hands of their children while flames from a burning cross licked at the night air. They warned of more rallies and marches.

  It is little wonder that dinnertime conversation at the Smiths often reflected concerns about the city’s dangers: Leila fretted about Black Bottom and the crime; she worried about the strangers who sidled up to her two lovely daughters, whispering sweet nothings; she lamented that Walker Sr. didn’t spend more time with their little son. And she feared the presence of the Klan. Walker Sr., in his Panama hat, was not worrying about the social order: He was intent on playing the role of Detroit hepcat, not Georgia rube.

  It was finally the actions of a Black Bottom neighbor that would justify the fears of Leila Smith and many other local blacks—fears that left Leila painfully missing quiet afternoons in the countryside she had left behind.

  Ossian Sweet was one of the few Negro doctors living and working in Detroit’s Black Bottom district. Born in Florida, he had obtained his medical degree from Howard University in the nation’s capital. He settled in Detroit in 1921. He and his wife, Gladys, had a daughter, Iva, and with his practice doing well, they wished to purchase a home away from Black Bottom, someplace in the city that was safe and might herald their middle-class stature. They bought a home on Garland Street, sold to them by a white couple. The neighborhood was all white. The couple who sold the Sweets the house told them—disingenuously—that while they would be integrating the neighborhood, they would not face any danger in doing so. But even before the Sweets moved in, posters appeared around the neighborhood advertising their arrival, and calling for protests. Threats against the Negro family were uttered at community meetings.

  On move-in day—September 8, 1925—the good doctor surrounded himself with protection, calling on his brother Henry and a group of Negro friends. Inside the house, they were well armed with guns. The first night passed with relative quiet, in spite of curious onlookers outside the windows. Before nightfall on the second day, however, more than three hundred whites had gathered near the house, all of them watched by police. Hurled stones and chunks of coal crashed onto the porch, shattering windows, causing the police to bolt into action. Ossian Sweet was determined to protect his family and property. Firing began from inside the house. With bullets whizzing, folk ducked and scattered. Voices howled. Two men—white—were hit. They were quickly taken to a nearby hospital. Eric Houghberg would survive his wound, but Leon Breiner would not. Eleven Negroes were arrested, including Oss
ian’s wife, Gladys. Within days the national press picked up the story of a Negro doctor bent on defending his family—and of a man who lay dead. The Klan threatened reprisals.

  James Weldon Johnson, the poet and literary figure, was executive secretary of the NAACP. The case of the Sweets touched him, and he decided to throw the weight of the civil rights organization behind the accused. Negro lawyers would be fine as part of the legal team, but Johnson feared they wouldn’t be able to maneuver around the politics of the case, given the entrenched racism in the legal structure of Detroit. He wanted a white lawyer—an outsider—on the team, and someone with a national reputation. After much wooing, Clarence Darrow, famous from the Scopes monkey trial and renowned for championing the oppressed, joined the defense team just two weeks before the trial’s beginning. The Sweet brothers and their codefen-dants—save for his wife, Gladys, who was released on bail—remained behind bars. Ossian was defiant. “I am willing to stay indefinitely in the cell and be punished,” he said. “I feel sure by the demonstration made by my people that they have confidence in me as a law-abiding citizen. I denounce the theory of Ku Kluxism and uphold the theory of manhood with a wife and tiny baby to protect.”

  Negro newspapers jumped into the fray from their editorial pages. “The heroic defense of their homes exhibited by those brave and fearless Detroiters,” came a salvo from a Negro publication in Philadelphia, “makes every Negro in this country their debtor.” When white liberal publications chimed in, defending Ossian Sweet’s right to protect his family, the NAACP knew it had backing beyond the Negro hallways of the nation. “The law in America is presumably broad enough to cover the Negro as well as the white man,” the New York World opined—if a touch dreamily.

  Clarence Darrow and his legal team went to work. “I realized that defending [N]egros, even in the [N]orth, was no boy’s job,” Darrow had said. As the trial got under way, the aging, white-haired lawyer showed dramatic flourishes in the courtroom, clipping away at eyewitness testimony offered by whites.

  It all ended in a mistrial, which meant the Sweets and their cohorts might still go to prison, as there would be a second trial. And for that second trial, Darrow enlisted the services of Thomas Chawke, a shrewd local attorney who had made a reputation defending gangsters. In facing the jury, Chawke talked about the city, its reputation, its politics, and its future. But the crowd awaited the big man in suspenders with the dramatic face: Darrow. He also talked of community, of safety, of man’s right to defend hearth and home. But he took the jurors into the very source of Ossian Sweet’s American ambitions; into the very heart of the pursuit of freedom: “Prejudices have burned men at the stake, broken them on the rack, torn every joint apart, destroyed people by the million,” he thundered. “Men have done this on account of some terrible prejudice which even now is reaching out to undermine this republic of ours and to destroy the freedom that has been the most cherished part of our institutions. These witnesses honestly believe that it is their duty to keep colored people out.” He talked of slavery, of blood, of the long nights endured by black Americans. Summing up his argument to the jury, he said: “I ask you, gentlemen, on behalf of this defendant, on behalf of these helpless ones who turn to you, and more than that—on behalf of this great state, and this great city which must face this problem, and face it fairly—I ask you in the name of progress and the human race, to return a verdict of not guilty in this case!”

  And the jury did so. Supporters of the defendants surrounded Darrow and the other lawyers. The Sweets were finally free to go home. The NAACP celebrated the case, and invited Dr. Sweet to appear before audiences.

  It was not quite enough, however, to assuage the fear that continued to grip blacks in the city. If a Negro doctor such as Ossian Sweet could have his life hanging in the balance, what might befall a common family from the South with no high connections or fancy college degrees? What calamity might befall the Smiths?

  In March of 1927, Leila Smith, along with her two daughters and five-year-old Walker Jr., fled both her husband and Detroit. A train delivered them all back to Georgia. Leila Smith took the children to the home of her mother. With the children—in her mind—out of harm’s way, she returned to Detroit. The South was still the South, and she needed money now, being the sole breadwinner for the family. She remained in Detroit a whole year, saving her earnings.

  In Georgia, little Walker Smith walked barefoot. He went hunting with uncles. “We ate well,” he would recall. “We had fresh milk from a big cow named Duck.” He witnessed the slaughtering of livestock, which shocked him. He missed his mother. Within a year Leila Smith returned to retrieve her children. In her absence, little Walker had grown extremely close to his sisters, grateful for their attempts at mothering. It was an attachment he would joyfully honor his entire life. Leila told them she was taking them back to Detroit. They wanted to know about their father, but Leila made no promises that he would be a constant part of their life. The children were surprised—and little Walker especially bewildered—but all happily boarded the train because they wanted to be with their mother.

  Upon coming back to Detroit, little Walker felt a sense of déjà vu: “The gray of winter was in the sky. The paint was peeling on most of the houses. The yards and alleys were muddy with melting snow.”

  But this time Leila Smith had a plan for her son: He’d join the Brewster Recreation Center. (Membership was twenty-five cents a month.) With luck that would keep him away from the ravages of Black Bottom.

  As soon as little Walker pushed his way through the doors of the center, he fell in love with it: He could swim, he could play basketball. He could paint and draw and play checkers. He came to see a kind of symphony at work: children running about who were just like him, many desperately poor like him, all uplifted by camaraderie and good times. He started seeing a big light-skinned youth around the center. Men uttered his name. The young man had won trophies while fighting in the ranks of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU). Every other month, it seemed, Joe Louis Barrow—whose name would later be shortened to Joe Louis—won yet another trophy for the Brewster rec center. There were news clippings on the walls at Brewster about him, and every little boy and girl saw those clippings. In time, little Walker became entranced. He followed Joe Louis Barrow around like an itchy kitten. Louis’s family also lived in Black Bottom, and his stepfather was yet one more laborer in Henry Ford’s employ. (John Roxborough, a Black Bottom numbers runner, financed Joe’s early Detroit training and led him into the professional ranks.) It was at Brewster that little Walker himself first put on a pair of boxing gloves. No one thought much about it, though the little tyke did seem unnaturally quick—it was the way his arm would shoot out from his shoulder. But he’d as soon zip off to play basketball as box: He simply wanted to play.

  A weariness, however, had already set in upon Leila Smith’s life in Detroit. She couldn’t make ends meet. No sooner would she consider a reconciliation with her husband than news of yet another infidelity on his part would stop her. He had turned into a cad and ne’er-do-well. There was that unyielding racial antagonism in the air—and the Depression was gnawing at many Black Bottom families barely holding-on. A female acquaintance told Leila to come to New York City, suggesting she could start anew there. For a single woman with three children, the decision to make such a move took uncommon bravery.

  In the late autumn of 1932, Leila—a woman possessed of a stout and no-nonsense character—gathered up her family and their belongings. They went downtown and climbed aboard a bus bound for New York City. Years earlier Leila Smith had joined so many others in the flight out of Egypt; now came her flight out of Detroit. She had made up her mind she was finally going to divorce her husband, and mother and children had conspired to keep Walker Sr. unaware of the plan. Upon visiting the house and realizing they had packed and left, he quickly rolled around Black Bottom in his Model T, trying to catch a glimpse of them—of his family, his estranged wife, daughters, his only son. But no matter how
fast he drove, which corners he turned, the Model T was useless. They were gone.

  Little Walker Smith and his family settled into Manhattan. Their first home, a three-room flat in midtown, was temporary quarters. Leila found work as a seamstress. Little Walker—eleven years old in 1932—busied himself in those early months by hanging out in front of the Broadway theatres in and around Times Square. He had acquired a fondness for tap dancing and jitterbugging. Along with new friends, he showed off impromptu dance steps beneath the neon-spilling theatre marquees. They were vagabond performances. When he wasn’t being shooed away, passersby dropped money at his feet: “Sometimes we’d make a couple dollars apiece on a good night,” Walker Jr. would remember of the dancing. But he missed Detroit—especially the Brewster Recreation Center—and he missed his father. He sometimes journeyed down to the docks of the Manhattan waterfront and stared out at the great hulking ships. He dreamed out into the rhythm of their horns and over the open waters. He had no manly defenders and trusted no one save his mother and sisters. He was a fatherless child in an unknown city, a place bigger and even more mysterious than Detroit.

  And when he barreled through the door of his home, complaining about yet another neighborhood scuffle—which he invariably got the worst of—Leila Smith showed no mercy. He was new to the community, he was going to be tested; she insisted he stand his ground. She harangued Walker Jr. about cowardice; she pushed him out the door to face his foes time and time again. His sisters fretted after him, but Leila instructed them against coddling. Her eyes seemed to bore right through Walker as he stood staring at her, his very own mother, who was pushing him back out toward the direction of danger.

  Leila Smith had been a field hand in the South. She did not have a fragile psyche; she was coarse and blunt and aggressive with her language. She argued with grocery store clerks over bills and she argued with rent collectors. She had lived under a roof with one man—Walker Sr.—whom she could not trust, who did not listen to her. She would not suffer such a fate again. When little Walker seemed to need a hug, he often received more tough words from his mother, stinging language about standing up, about pride. “She’d give you a fucking beating if you got smart with her,” recalls newspaperman Jimmy Breslin, who got to know the family in later years and befriended Leila. “She had been a field hand in the South. Now she could be fun. But she was a tough woman.”