My second book, which chronicles black life in Detroit during the 1930s, 40s and 50s and is centered on the Black Bottom and Paradise Valley districts of the city, will be released later this month. Heres a sample: It’s 1936. America had endured a sweltering summer heat wave that posted triple-digit temperatures and took the lives of more than five thousand people nationwide. In fact, between July 8 and July 14, high temperatures in the Motor City soared between a hundred and a hundred-and-four degrees coupled with pressure-cooker like humidity. Streets hot enough to fry an egg buckled. Lawns choked by dry air browned and burned. Men and women without ventilating air and electricity were struck with cardiac arrest and collapsed. At least three hundred and sixty-four of them died during that week, including Isaac Irvin of 703 Winder Street located between St. Antoine and Hastings near Black Bottom. If he had managed to drum up five pennies, walk down a couple of blocks into Paradise Valley, and purchase a Hershey chocolate bar, it surely would have melted in his hand well before he could get back home. Young Isaac didn’t live on the more affluent, lily white, far west side. He couldn’t escape to the modern swimming pool at Rouge Park where shallow and deep depths were marked for the young and old. So he, like many other east siders, took to the cool-watered Detroit River for relief. The African-American boy, however, was simply no match for the current that can be strong and choppy even on a hot day. He fought to stay afloat. Young Isaac drowned near the Naval Amory and Belle Isle Bridge. He was only ten years old. Meanwhile, the town had been suffering through the brother-can-you-spare-a-dime days of the Great Depression. Its hometown hero and twenty-two-year-old rising star Joe Louis, grew up humble but proud, first in Alabama and later at 2700 Catherine Street near Chene Street near Black Bottom. He learned the sweet science at the Brewster Recreation Center but Max Schmeling had overpowered him a couple of weeks before. The thirty-year-old German fighter, former heavyweight champion of the world, was viewed by some as a puppet guided by the hands of Adolph Hitler, the German Chancellor and leader of the Nazi Party, who by this time was setting the stage to wreak havoc throughout Europe with his ideology of the dominance of the Aryan race. The boxing battle took place on June 19 at Yankee Stadium in New York City. Schmeling, an inch shorter and a few pounds lighter, landed a devastating right hand to Louis’ six-foot-two inch frame. He followed that blow with another orthodox shot to Louis’ jaw. Louis’ tree trunk-like legs were as wobbly as spaghetti noodles. The sheer force of the punches caused Louis, who had been undefeated in twenty-three professional contests, to fall suddenly onto the canvas in the twelfth round before forty-five thousand spectators like the stock market in October 1929. The loss was a huge defeat for black folks in Detroit, some of whom had huddled and listened intently to the fight, as opposed to their Friday night staple Amos ‘n’ Andy, via wooden cabinet, breadbox-sized Philco radio. They were starving for a symbolic win over intense racism and oppression. During the previous year alone, newspapers across the country reported that whites had lynched twenty black Americans, mainly in the South. In the Detroit Tribune, a leading African-American weekly newspaper edited by the brilliant poet and activist James Edward McCall, the front-page banner headline proposed a reprehensible reason to explain the Louis–Schmeling outcome. It read: “Roxborough Denies Rumor That Joe Louis Was Doped.” In the piece, John W. Roxborough, the heavyweight boxer’s manager, vehemently denied claims that Louis, who was a 10-to-1 odds favorite, either took a dive or was high. Fast forward to October 19. It’s a more seasonable sixty-eight degrees and after anguishing and toiling through a challenging proverbial planting season of pain and suffering endured and lives lost, harvest arrived. Joe Louis, who rebounded and followed up the loss to Schmeling with a third-round knockout win over Jack Sharkey on August 18 and a fifth-round knockout win over Al Ettore on September 22, is one of three thousand folks attending a joyous ceremony at the Graystone Ballroom, located on Woodward Avenue between Canfield and Willis. The same five-storey structure with neo Gothic exterior called by some “the cradle of jazz” where Duke Ellington and Count Basie orchestra bands played to the delight of the hundreds of whites but faced the harsh Jim Crow reality that people who looked like them were relegated to patronizing the institution on Monday night—“Colored Night.” Roy H. Lightfoot, who owned the B&C Beer Garden and called home a dwelling located at 1726 St. Antoine Street at Beacon Street just outside downtown in the heart of Detroit’s black entertainment and business district, had beat out a dozen other candidates to become Paradise Valley district’s first elected mayor.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 10:54:50 +0000
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