Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit

CONCLUSION

CONCLUSION Motown Is Burning, Jesus Is Black, and the Struggle Continues Motown, if you don’t come around, we’re gonna burn you down. —Stokely Carmichael, Detroit, 1966 Neither the work of community organizations such as the WCO nor that of established civil rights organizations, from the NAACP and the Detroit Urban League to the Group on Advanced Leadership, nor the resources channeled into Detroit’s War (some called it a skirmish) on Poverty was enough to prevent the outbreak of urban rebellion in the city. Several years after the uprisings in Watts and Harlem, and just weeks after one in Newark, Detroit was rocked by four days of ‹res, shooting (much of it done by the police and the National Guard), and looting. The rebellion left 43 dead and another 347 were injured. Over 7,000 people, the majority of them Black, had been arrested, and nearly 1,300 buildings lay in ruins. Detroit would never be the same.1 Before the rebellion, city of‹cials and some civil rights spokespersons were still clinging to the image of Detroit as a “model city.” But image and reality were in obvious con›ict. Years later Mel Ravitz, who by 1967 had served six years on the Common Council and would go on to serve many more, opined that the city administration’s problems began after the 1965 elections at the beginning of Cavanagh’s second term. The incumbent faced raging debates 286 over education, housing, and police-community relations, as well as heated disagreements with the council on budgetary issues. In the wake of the rebellion, Ravitz recalled, Cavanagh seemed “unable to comprehend what had happened. . . . I think he had begun to believe that some of the things that were being said about Detroit being a model city in regard to race relation were true. I think the riot stunned him and I don’t think that he ever recovered thereafter.”2 Cavanagh’s perplexity and paralysis can be seen as a metonym for the reaction of some segments of the liberal-labor coalition in general, and they were certainly characteristic of the reactions of many city leaders, who had never looked behind the thin veneer of progress. The late 1960s found Detroit’s economy in the midst of one of its longest boom cycles to date. Opportunities for Black industrial employment had been increasing steadily since 1963. Yet the unemployment rate for inner-city Black adults was stuck at 11 percent, more than triple the average for workers in the Detroit metropolitan region. Almost half of all Black public school students were dropping out before graduation, and unemployment among those twenty-‹ve and under ranged from 30 to 40 percent. Even those who completed their high school education could expect to earn an average of sixteen hundred dollars less than their white counterparts. The economic inequality had a severe impact, with one of every three Black families living below the federal poverty line of three thousand dollars annual income. Detroit’s War on Poverty was one of the largest local efforts in the nation, but of the 360,000 residents living in poverty only 70,000 were receiving direct aid.3 The rebellion brought the connections between race and poverty into stark clarity. On the one hand, it spurred a mad scramble for more funding from public , private, and especially religious sources and for more community organizing around the concept of self-determination. On the other hand, it fueled efforts to combat racial and economic exploitation at the point of production in the Detroit area plants. Attendance at Central Congregational/Shrine of the Black Madonna skyrocketed after the rebellion, and Reverend Cleage soon became “the titular head of the 700,000-member Detroit Black community.”4 Reverend Cleage had already launched an early version of his Black Christian nationalism movement by unveiling a large painting of the Black Madonna and child on Easter Sunday 1967. In this striking painting, which is eighteen feet high by nine feet wide, an imposing and very dark woman in a white headdress or veil and a white robe with a blue shawl cradles an equally dark infant swaddled in saffron cloth. The pair is posed before a blue sky standing de‹antly on gray and rocky ground CONCLUSION 287 with a town barely visible along the horizon. The portrait hangs in the church’s chancel, above the altar, covering an original...