THIRTEEN

OCTOBER 18, 1963

Eager to host the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, Detroit presents its case to the International Olympic Committee in Baden-Baden, Germany. Despite a personal appeal from President John F. Kennedy and a united front presented by Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Michigan governor George Romney, Detroit loses out to Mexico City—the eighth time the city fails in its quest to attract the Games.

Detroit rolled up in style. Mayor Cavanagh led the delegation, and he had much to say about Detroit as the quintessentially American city—a kaleidoscope of cultures, ethnicities, and nationalities. Governor Romney emphasized the state’s fiscal strengths. They had brought interpreters and fancy equipment, so their speeches were simultaneously translated into French. They screened a film in which President John F. Kennedy himself expressed his enthusiastic support for the Detroit bid, along with images of a broad array of sporting facilities at the city’s disposal—Detroit TV broadcast the film that very same evening.1 The audience in Baden-Baden’s palatial Kurhaus was so impressed that it interrupted the presentation with applause no fewer than twelve times—a good sign for the Motor City.

And then it got weird. The Argentinians had gone first, reading their humdrum pitch in French, followed by translators who repeated it in English. Seeing Detroit’s elegant presentation, they asked if they might repeat their presentation—using Detroit’s equipment! Gracious to a fault, the Detroiters agreed, and naturally, the French and the Mexican delegations requested the same favor. The Michigan team, which never managed to realize that this competition was a cutthroat affair, granted it. France, playing to type, extolled the beauty of Lyon and the world-class skills of its chefs. Finally, the Mexican delegation spent a good deal of its time denying that altitude would be a problem and, rather scandalously, offered to pay board and lodging for any Olympic athletes who wanted to come two weeks early in order to adapt to said “no problem” altitude.

There was a Q&A, and the representatives of the international sports federations proceeded to a vote. The result was as shocking to the Motor City as it was unambiguous: with two votes for Buenos Aires, twelve for Lyon, and fourteen votes for Detroit, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had awarded the 1968 Olympic Games, with thirty votes, to Mexico City. This was the eighth time Detroit had thrown its hat into the ring, and the eighth time the city was spurned.

The bid’s chairman, Fred Matthaei, declared himself to be “surprised, disappointed, shocked.” Douglas Roby, a U.S. member of the IOC who was strongly connected to both Detroit and the bid, blamed the decision on anti-American resentment: “I really thought we had it. But I am convinced now the members simply do not think the games should come to the United States, even though they haven’t come here since 1932. They think the United States has everything. We are a ‘have’ nation. This is an era of ‘have-nots.’”2 IOC president Avery Brundage, an American born in Detroit, thought that “Detroit definitely would have picked up support on later ballots”—but there were no later ballots.³ Mexico lucked out by a single vote. Thirty was exactly the number of votes needed to constitute an outright majority of the fifty-eight IOC members. Had Mexico City received twenty-nine, Buenos Aires would have been eliminated in a new round of votes, and perhaps, just perhaps, Mexico would have just fallen short again, and there would have been a runoff between the two top cities. Who knew which horses could have been traded in that world of topline sports politics?

One vote, then. And that is where it becomes so particularly galling: it appeared quite likely that this single vote that put Mexico City over the line came from a representative of the United States.⁴ John Garland was the son of William Garland, responsible for bringing the 1932 Olympic Games to Los Angeles and an IOC member from 1922 until his death in 1948. The younger Garland had “inherited” his father’s seat, and by all accounts, he simply detested Detroit. He had a long record of opposing Detroit’s Olympic aspirations at every turn, denigrating the city’s fitness in none too subtle public statements.5 These days, quite sensibly, IOC members from the bidder nation are not allowed to vote precisely because they’d be assumed to favor their own nation. John Garland’s nation, however, appears to have been Southern California.

You would think Brundage, the native Detroiter, would have reined him in, but Brundage had been a close friend of the elder Garland, and he held John in quasi-paternal esteem. By all accounts, every time the Detroit Olympic Committee complained about Garland’s malicious shenanigans, Brundage would smile indulgently and tell them not to worry.⁶ Brundage, in any case, was no champion of the city—one of a long line of Detroiters who left and never looked back.

To be fair, the defeat of Detroit’s Olympic aspirations can hardly be laid just at the feet of John Garland or Avery Brundage. It had been widely reported earlier in the week that Cold War politics were hampering the city’s chances.⁷ After Tokyo 1964, Rome 1960, and Melbourne 1956, it was certainly the turn of the Americas, but Mexico is part of the Americas too. Additionally, the Soviet Union controlled a significant bloc of votes supporting Mexico City over the rival superpower. And then there were financial considerations: surprising as it may seem by today’s standards, the athletes were expected to pay their own room and board, for the Olympics were still rigidly amateur. Without much doubt, each of the competing cities would have happily absorbed the expenses involved, but appearances had to be upheld, and each city had to put a price tag on athlete accommodations: Detroit had figured $3 per day and got undercut, however minimally, by Mexico City’s charge of $2.80 per day.⁸ But more importantly, the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement—representing countries that sided with neither the U.S.S.R. nor the U.S., many of which had just emerged from colonial rule—decided that it was a time for the torch to finally travel to one of the developing nations.

There were many reasons Detroit lost out that year, then, some of them good ones. And still, it was a shame, for the 1968 Detroit bid was, by any objective criteria, a strong one—and honed over decades and decades of trying. By February of 1963, the Detroit Olympic Committee had established fifteen subcommittees, including Executive, Finance, Accounting, Athletic Facilities, Catering, Ethnic Group Participation, Housing, Legal, Medical, Public Relations, and Transportation.9 They had Cavanagh’s and Romney’s full support, but they had also enlisted many of the city’s big hitters, including Henry Ford II as well as senior executives of all the Detroit auto companies, along with other industrialists, bankers, politicians, lawyers, academics, and press and TV representatives. Al Kaline, the Tigers batter, was on board. Detroit’s African American community was less well represented, although the NAACP’s Edward Turner served on the Games Programming Committee, and Richard Austin, who would later run for mayor, on the Accounting Committee.¹⁰

Detroit has always been well endowed with sports facilities that could be used for Olympic events—a fact that remains true today. In 1963, Detroit proposed indoor venues such as Olympia Stadium, the University of Detroit’s Memorial Arena, and the Light Guard Armory, and outdoor facilities such as the University of Detroit Stadium, Tiger Stadium, the Brennan Pools, and the University of Michigan’s football stadium in Ann Arbor (aka “the Big House”). Belle Isle would provide a fabulous setting for equestrian events; the sailors and the rowers would have the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair for their competitions. Last but not least, there was the riverfront Cobo Arena of Auto Show fame, completed in 1960 as part of the Civic Center, and a fine illustration of Detroit’s dynamism.¹¹

The bid’s slogan was “A City on the Move,” and it had only one glaring weakness: Detroit had no Olympic Stadium and would have to build one. But where? The question of site divided opinion, as it would for another decade. The frontrunner was always the State Fairgrounds just off Woodward and Eight Mile, at the northern edge of the city.¹² However, the owner of the Tigers, John Fetzer, had his eye on that site for a future baseball facility. William Clay Ford, on the other hand, right then in the process of acquiring the Lions, favored the Fairgrounds for the Olympic Stadium, as did Cavanagh and Romney, who were working well together despite belonging to different political parties. The city planning department, however, historically a strong voice in the development of the city, was more interested in boosting redevelopment in the downtown riverfront area. Yet a third option under discussion was Wayne State University’s stadium in midtown, which could have been enlarged. That alternative had an added advantage: the university could repurpose any newly built Olympic Village facilities as student accommodations. The bickering and the back-and-forth lasted too long for the choice to settle, a lack of resolve that undermined the bid’s credibility. The IOC was understandably reluctant to rely on promises of resolutions to come and essential facilities to emerge—who knows, Detroit might have done better in Baden-Baden had they made up their mind and broken ground.

In retrospect, the Olympic bid may also testify to the overreach of white progressives of the 1960s such as Jerome Cavanagh. No doubt, Cavanagh was a force for progress and a strong supporter of civil rights, a stance which earned him solid electoral support from African American voters—more than 30 percent of Detroit’s population, at a time when the white flight to the suburbs was well underway. To be sure, there was at least some African American representation on the Olympic committees, and two African Americans accompanied the delegation to Baden-Baden—including Rafer Johnson, a truly inspirational figure who had taken Decathlon gold during the 1960 games.13 Including a few African Americans in your most visible endeavors, however, does not mean you have taken the temperature of the affected communities when it comes to city politics, and Cavanagh was taken by surprise when the energy and resources devoted to Olympic bid created resentment among a significant portion of African American Detroit. The growing tensions boiled over when Olympic politics and housing politics spectacularly clashed, turning what was meant to be a glorious PR event into a humiliating spectacle.

The publicity stunt had been cleverly conceived: on September 27, they would light a torch in Los Angeles, the site of the last Olympic Games in the United States, and carry it across the country to Detroit, along legendary Route 66. The final torchbearer, Hayes Jones, arrived in Detroit on the evening of the 12th of October, a Saturday. In front of the City-County Building downtown, Cavanagh was waiting to receive the torch in a ceremony meant to create a brilliant photo opportunity, garnering broad public support for the bid. Instead, a significant number of black Detroiters showed up to loudly boo both Cavanagh and Detroit’s Common Council, decisively defeating the purpose.¹⁴ Rumor has it that John Garland took not a little delight in informing the IOC of the publicity disaster that had unfolded just six days before the IOC vote.

Cavanagh, furious, called the protesters “rowdy and disgraceful,” but they, in turn, saw a bigger disgrace in a Common Council vote that had taken place only four days earlier.15 One factor that had rendered Detroit one of the most segregated cities in the country were the blatantly discriminatory practices of bankers and real estate agents when it came to home sales and loans. They had instituted a point system for ranking applicants, which was based not just on income but also on occupation and race. A version of blatantly illegal practices known, in aggregate, as “redlining,” the point system effectively excluded black Detroiters from white neighborhoods.

Up for a vote at the council was an “open occupancy” ordinance that would have banned such practices. Cavanagh, like Romney, supported the measure and actively campaigned for it, and yet, shockingly, the council, still dominated by white power brokers, voted it down. It wasn’t even close: 7 to 2.¹⁶ Who could possibly blame black Detroit for taking institutionalized and blatantly sanctioned racism to be a more urgent concern than yet another bid for the Olympics? A bid that, furthermore, might well lead to more urban renewal (read: black removal) if it were to succeed.

Cavanagh’s and Romney’s civil rights bona fides were real. At a major conference on “open occupancy” organized the year before, Romney had said that he was “personally convinced that racial, religious and ethnic discrimination is our most serious domestic problem.”¹⁷ On coming into office in 1961, having won 85 percent of the black vote, Cavanagh appointed African Americans as city controller, head of the Mayor’s Commission on Children and Youth, secretary to the Department of Public Works and, most importantly of all given the history of police misconduct, commissioner of police.¹⁸ The unions, not always a force for racial justice, supported progressive policies at the time, and the most notable expression of that support came from Walter Reuther, the powerful head of the UAW. While race relations in Detroit had a long way to go, under Cavanagh many had come to see the city as a beacon of hope with regard to social justice and integration. Famously, in June 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. himself led the Walk to Freedom along Woodward Avenue, from Adelaide Street to Cobo Hall, culminating in an early version of one of the most stirring speeches in U.S. history, “I Have a Dream.” According to estimates, 125,000 citizens marched with Dr. King, among them many of Detroit’s politically active religious leaders. Cavanagh and Reuther were there, and Romney, he said, was missing only because his religious beliefs did not allow him to march on a Sunday—but he did send a representative in his place.19 And just a few years later, Cavanagh would be the only elected politician to serve on President Johnson’s “Model Cities” task force, an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful national endeavor to reimagine urban renewal and fund an array of projects and services (the program was terminated in 1974, after an increasingly conservative America turned against its largest cities).²⁰

But in 1963, the optics of racial unity were largely an illusion, in Detroit as elsewhere—the council vote exposed the raw hypocrisy. To be sure, quite a few white residents were committed to increased social and racial justice, and willing to vote for candidates committed to change—but many more were not, and Detroit remained divided, segregated, and troubled. After having been asked to display “patience” for decade after decade, more and more African Americans were tired of the political dictates of the “white moderates” whom MLK excoriates in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Detroit in this era was a hotbed of black political thought, much of it supported and developed by a powerful network of churches. King brought the Walk to Freedom to Detroit in no small part because of his admiration for the Reverend C.L. Franklin, pastor of the New Bethel Baptist Church, located less than a mile north of the Olympia Stadium on Linwood Street.²¹ Franklin, born in Mississippi in 1915, came to Detroit in the 1940s, where his celebrated lyrical sermons soon attracted a devoted following.²² In the early 1960s, he founded the Detroit Council for Human Rights (DCHR), aiming to take leadership away from the NAACP, which he perceived to be out of touch with everyday black experience. The Walk to Freedom launched the DCHR to prominence, but its success would be short-lived: a month later, the DCHR’s attempt to stage a regional leadership conference floundered when Franklin refused to allow members of more radical black organizations to participate.

One of the most influential of the figures Franklin sought to exclude was Reverend Albert Cleage Jr., mentioned in the previous chapter. Cleage had created his own church just four blocks south of New Bethel on Linwood, which would eventually become the Shrine of the Black Madonna. In the early 1960s, Cleage’s ministry was focused on helping the poor while demanding greater recognition of black leadership in the civil rights movement. He scorned the idea that white politicians such as Jerome Cavanagh and Walter Reuther could assume the mantle of leadership in black communities, and he promoted the proliferation of new black political thought—the same kind of thought that would be practiced at a certain speakeasy establishment on Twelfth Street in 1967.

By 1968, when he published The Black Messiah, Cleage’s philosophy had been transformed into a fully separatist theology focusing on the reinterpretation of the Bible in ways that centered African and African American consciousness, subjectivity, and spirituality. Cleage had split from the DCHR soon after the Walk to Freedom, and in early November, he organized a rival conference that is remembered primarily for another famous speech, this one entitled “A Message to the Grass Roots.” The speaker was Malcolm X, who had close ties to Detroit and frequently lectured in the city on the need for revolutionary action, not necessarily of the nonviolent kind. “Who,” he asked, “ever heard of a revolution where they lock arms, as Rev. Cleage was pointing out beautifully, and sing ‘We Shall Overcome’?”23

For these activists, the Olympics were at best a distraction, at worst another plot to preserve the status quo. Over the course of the next few years, historical events would overwhelm all of these actors. In November 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated. In the aftermath of the national grief, Lyndon B. Johnson forced the passage of the Civil Rights Act, which had languished under a Senate filibuster. In 1965, Malcolm X died in a hail of bullets in the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, and in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The high hopes that had, for a brief time, united black and white leaders died with them, as segregation continued and police forces across the country found new ways to uphold white power and privilege and to subject black America to its own separate regime of mass incarceration. By comparison, the careers of white liberals such as Cavanagh and Romney were minor casualties.²⁴

It may be a frivolous thought experiment to wonder if a successful Olympic bid would have changed the course of Detroit’s history. We can be reasonably certain that the construction of an Olympic Stadium and other facilities, even if they had created some jobs for a while, would have done little to address the root causes of poverty and injustice in the city. In fact, if previous urban renewal projects are anything to go by, they are more likely to have added to them. At the same time, one should not entirely discount the psychological effects of a large-scale international event of such prominence and prestige as the Olympics. In addition, there is the simple fact that, for a few years at least, the word “Detroit” would have evoked the Games—a global feel-good affair that could have put Detroit on international maps in a new way. It might just have changed the atmosphere for a while. Then again, it is as likely that any protest such as the ones of 1967 would have been met with even more brutal and crushing force, leading to more rather than less bloodshed—the 1932 Olympics, after all, had done nothing for Watts.

One of the saddest memorials to the failed bid of 1963 can be found in the dusty boxes of the Detroit Olympics Archive in the Detroit Public Library. To build support for the bid, the Detroit Olympic Committee organized a local petition drive, and the bundles of signed petitions have been preserved. There must be tens of thousands of signatures, from schoolkids across the city and from all neighborhoods in metro Detroit. For a moment, then, the Detroit Olympics might have brought the city together, in the same way the Tigers would by winning the World Series in 1968. Everything bad and sad would have re-emerged soon thereafter, there is little doubt. But history is timing, and it is not impossible to think that the bread and circuses of the Olympic Games might have nudged the city away from the conflagration of 1967—who knows with what results?

It is fitting to the memory of Detroit’s failed bid that the iconic moment of the 1968 Olympic Games was not a singular athletic feat but two raised fists: the black power salutes of Tommie Smith and John Carlos.