A CHRISTIAN WOMAN
NAMED VIOLENCE
When I told Bea Buck about some of the kids I had met—the fearsome Floyd; George, with a year missing from his life; Matthew, stabbed and bleeding on the lawn near the Seawinds—she looked up from the colored people’s spaghetti she was preparing and said, “Somebody ought to cut them little fuckers’ heads off with a sword.” She pronounced the w, giving the sentiment a biblical flavor, and then went back to stirring her pot in the narrow kitchen of her downtown apartment.
Ms. Buck is not a cook. She is police communications specialist by profession, an amateur playwright by avocation, and something of a social commentator. Close to sixty, she is a handsome, ample-breasted woman with a high-pitched laugh and sparkling almond eyes. Her round, caramel face contrasts nicely with a sharp tongue, and she dispenses mordant observations on the human condition in the barbed aphoristic style of a Motown Ambrose Bierce.
I had offered to bring some wine for dinner, but Ms. Buck told me she doesn’t drink wine. When I remarked that most Americans don’t, she was quick to correct me.
“I am not an American,” she said, stiffly.
“Then what are you?” I asked.
“A colored person,” she replied, a note of challenge in her voice.
“Let me ask you something. Did you ever think what it would be like to be white?”
“No, I never thought about it and I never want to,” she said. “The idea horrifies me, if you want to know. White people will steal the taste right out of your mouth.”
Ms. Buck went into her bedroom and emerged with a photograph of her maternal grandfather, who was white. “I never liked that man,” she said. “He scared me when I was a little girl.”
“But you’ve got his picture. That must mean something.”
“That’s right, I do. Well, the truth is that nobody else in the family would take it, so I did.”
She was so obviously enjoying the chance to shock a visitor that I persisted. “You can’t tell me that you never wondered what it would be like to be white. You’re a writer—aren’t you at least curious about what white people’s lives are like, what they think about, talk about …”
“I know what they talk about,” she said. “They talk about niggers.” She laughed and asked for my plate. “I fixed you some colored people’s spaghetti,” she said.
“Okay, what’s colored people’s spaghetti?”
“That is spaghetti that ain’t cooked right,” she said with a loud laugh, dishing a mound of it onto my plate.
Bea Buck was born and raised in Detroit. As a young girl she worked as a switchboard operator at the Gotham Hotel, the city’s fanciest black establishment, where she became friendly with the entertainers, politicians and other celebrities who patronized the clubs and cabarets of nearby Paradise Valley. Despite poverty and segregation, Ms. Buck regards the late forties and early fifties as a golden era, a time when black Detroit had safe streets, glamorous nightlife and obedient children.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “We had plenty of problems back then, too. But we certainly didn’t have the opportunities that these children have today. The only thing they’ve been deprived of is a functioning brain. They’ve been raised without any values. There’s only one answer: Somebody needs to cut the little fuckers’ heads off with a sword.”
Fred Williams, spokesman for the Detroit Police Department, was both appalled and diverted by Bea Buck’s sanguine solution to the city’s crime problem. She and Williams are old friends, and he is well acquainted with her hyperbolic style. When I asked him if the department was laying in a stock of swords, he shook his head and said fondly, “Bea Buck is crazy.”
“She cooked me colored people’s spaghetti,” I told him. “You know, spaghetti that ain’t cooked right.”
The conceit did not amuse Inspector Williams. “You come by my place and I’ll cook you a real dinner,” he said. “And bring Ms. Bea Buck with you. I’ll show you what colored people’s cooking is all about.”
“Freddie Williams is crazy,” said Bea Buck fondly, as we rose to the twenty-first floor of the Jeffersonian, a luxury high rise on the Detroit River, on the way to dinner. “But I’ll admit one something—that man does know how to cook.”
In Williams’s apartment, which might be more accurately described as a bachelor pad, hundreds of videotapes lined the walls and elaborate stereo equipment was stacked neatly next to an electric organ in the tasteful living room. Art books lay primly on the coffee table, in marked contrast to the sybaritic king-size bed in the bedroom. As Williams led me to the balcony to gaze at the lights of the city and his fishing boat bobbing below in the marina, the aroma of New Orleans gumbo wafted out of his small, immaculate kitchen.
The gumbo was as good as it smelled. Williams is a perfectionist, and as we ate he discoursed on the intricacies of Cajun cooking, one of his many hobbies. He produced literature—cookbooks and guides to New Orleans restaurants—and explained every aspect of preparing the complicated dish.
An ex-amateur boxer and high school football star, Fred Williams became a cop in the fifties. “In those days, the only time you saw a picture of a black man in a white newspaper, it had ‘wanted’ printed over it,” he said. “Black policemen were locked into three precincts. We couldn’t even patrol Woodward Avenue. That was in preliberation times. Hell, they used to have a black holdup squad with all white officers. People talk about the good old days? Well, what was so good about them?”
During those years, before the Young administration, Fred Williams was known as a militant. He led protests against discrimination in the department, and was considered a troublemaker by many of the white officers. He went into his bedroom and emerged with several photos of a younger officer Williams, with a formidable Afro, dressed in a dashiki.
Along with the photos, Williams brought out a police scanner. It crackled with reports from the street below. A man was cut in a knife fight on Chicago Boulevard. “We’ve got to rid ourselves of drugs and guns,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for a knight on a white horse ever since Martin Luther King died. These kids today, now that the civil rights bills are in, they think they have a free ticket. Young parents don’t realize that the fight isn’t over. Hell, we haven’t even begun. We’re going backwards. Blacks can’t sit around and wait for whites to do for us. The trouble with us is us.”
“Freddie, did you ever think about what it would be like to be white?” Bea asked, a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Williams snorted. “I wouldn’t be white for nothin’,” he said. “I would have missed a lot of living. The heritage we have is so rich and so proud, we’ve done so much with so many handicaps.”
“What I can’t stand is these siditty folks who move out of town, them little bourgeois-ass niggers,” said Bea Buck. “They go out there and just tear up. They don’t know anything about lawns, anyway. The only thing a black person wants to do with something green is put it in a pot and boil it with some ham hocks.” She laughed happily.
“I go out to the suburbs for a drive, and police cars follow me,” said Williams. “Now, what in hell is suspicious about me? When I get into an elevator with a white woman, she looks at me like I’m going to mug her. Because that’s what she’s been conditioned to think about black men.
“Basically this is a problem of image. We got a problem with the media. And it’s not just the way they make us look to other people; the media make you feel bad about Detroit, bad about yourself. They call it a hellhole. Is Detroit worse than other cities? Hell no. Are the Dallas Cowboys ‘America’s Team’? Same thing, it just PR.”
The radio crackled again—a fatal shooting on the east side.
Williams cast his gaze toward the glistening lights of the city below. “Things are building up out there,” he said in a low voice. “Could we have another riot like 1967? Shit, yeah. The police were the catalyst last time, but it would have happened anyway. The lack of jobs, the despair, the bullshit by the politicians—read the Kerner Report, you could adjust it to today. It’s building up, and if something isn’t done, it could happen again.”
“I’ll tell you something,” he continued. “Detroit was the first city to get a lot of these problems, and it’s going to be the first city to find solutions to them. We’re going to solve these urban problems and blacks are going to do it. The real answer is moral—the family and especially the church. We need moral rearmament; this is basically a very moral city.”
Ms. Buck, serious for once, nodded in agreement. “The church is a sleeping giant,” she said. “And it’s about time it woke its tired self up.”
Williams rose from the table, dimmed the lights and sat down at his small electric organ. He is a self-taught musician who, with typical thoroughness, learned to read music as well as play by ear. He ran his fingers over the keyboard with a professional flourish and began to play “Tenderly.” Bea Buck closed her eyes and sang along quietly. Twenty-one floors below the lights twinkled merrily while the police radio crackled, bringing news from another planet.
Wherever I went that fall, people talked about the need for what Fred Williams called “moral rearmament,” a return to a perhaps mythical time of traditional values and accepted authority. And, not surprisingly, they tended to look for leadership to the city’s most powerful institution—the church.
“In this city, people stay on their knees,” a woman told me, and it was true. In Detroit, Christianity—specifically black Protestant fundamentalism—approaches the status of state doctrine. It touches every aspect of public life—politics, government, art, culture, education—in a way unknown in other American cities. Public school choirs sing gospel songs and classrooms are decorated with pictures of prominent religious personalities. Political meetings begin with prayers and hymns. Clergymen write columns in the newspapers and serve as precinct captains for the Coleman Young machine. In 1988, four of the nine members of the Common Council were ordained ministers.
One day I came across a copy of a form letter sent by a city department to thousands of citizens. It was signed “Yours in Christ.”
“How can you send something like this?” I asked the official. “Haven’t you heard that there is separation of church and state in America?”
“Maybe in America,” the official said with a grin. “But not here.”
Nobody knows for sure just how many churches there are in Detroit (the usual estimate is upwards of 2,500, one for every 400 people); with the commercial exodus from the city, banks, grocery stores and theaters have been transformed into houses of worship, and there are some blocks with a church on every corner. In most of them, the majority of worshipers are women, often accompanied by small children or grandchildren, and elderly men. A generation ago, several ministers told me, there was a more even balance between the sexes. “Used to be, the women came to pray with their menfolk,” a deacon told me. “Today, they come to pray for them.”
I attended a different church almost every Sunday for months, and I was usually the only white in attendance. My reception was always warm and welcoming. Ushers smiled and nodded when I arrived; members of the congregation supplied me with prayer books and stenciled church bulletins, and made it a point to shake my hand at the end of worship. Often I was acknowledged from the pulpit and asked to stand and introduce myself. Invariably, when I did so, I received a round of encouraging applause.
Predictably, these congregations came in all sizes, shapes and shades of black. They ranged from the flinty respectability of the elite black churches, such as Hartford Memorial, to frenzied storefronts and cultist shrines. Taken together, they are an institution that might someday spearhead the moral rearmament that Fred Williams talked about.
Despite their denominational diversity, the ministers in the city can be divided into two primary groups—those who emphasize works, and those who preach faith. Jim Holley, a short, powerfully built, light-skinned preacher from North Carolina, is a works man.
Holley is the pastor of Little Rock Baptist Church, one of the largest and most prominent in Detroit. Its chapel seats around one thousand, and it is usually full on Sunday mornings, when Reverend Holley preaches. Thousands more listen to his sermons on the radio, see his billboards advertising Little Rock Baptist’s philosophy (“Don’t Worry, Be Happy”) as they drive along the freeways, or read about his various political campaigns and social programs in the newspapers. Since he came to town fifteen years ago, Jim Holley’s activism and outspoken eloquence have made him one of Detroit’s most visible clergymen.
His credentials are impressive—a B.A. from Tennessee State University, M.A.s from Tennessee State and the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in education from Wayne State. Despite his degrees, however, Holley affects a down-home style and calls himself “a country preacher,” a title he appropriated from his friend and political mentor, the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Most of Little Rock’s 3,500 members are working class people, and a good many come from the South. Holley wants them to feel at home.
Little Rock is an impressive mock gothic building on Woodward Avenue, next to Northern High School. On an August Sunday morning, sunshine filtered through the stained-glass windows of its high-ceilinged chapel, and the polished wood pews were crowded with worshipers dressed in accordance with the church’s informal summer dress code—jeans, sport shirts, jogging outfits and even work clothes.
After some gospel music by an excellent choir, Reverend Holley, dressed in a sparkling white robe, rose from his seat on the pulpit, prayed briefly, and then began the service by reading his personal want ads from a stack of three-by-five note cards. “Channel Two is looking for a television technician and a secretary,” he said, and shuffled the cards. “A lady’s clothing store downtown is looking for a stock boy.” Shuffle. “The federal government is hiring air controllers. Say amen!” The congregation dutifully responded. “Now, you can get that job, church,” he said. “There are jobs out there, but it’s a job finding a job. So while you’re looking, touch up your skills. Out of eighty-five thousand pilots in this country, only two hundred are black. You can be a pilot. But you gotta get trained. Say amen. Now say amen again. If any of y’all are interested in applying for these jobs, you come and see me. I’m not letting anybody go out on any job interviews without getting past me first.” A laugh rose from the pews. When I asked him later what he had meant, he smiled and said, “Oh, it’s just a charisma line.”
Satisfied, Holley moved on. “This winter we’ll be giving out ten thousand pair of shoes,” he said. The announcement was greeted with silence. “Now, that’s ten thousand pairs of shoes, church,” he reminded them. “Y’all ought to clap or faint or somethin’.” The congregation laughed and applauded.
Riding the applause, Holley expounded his self-help vision for the black community. “We got to teach our children to read. Open up the school of Little Angels, teach our kids foreign languages, computers. We don’t want them dancing da butt all day long. There’s more to life than da butt. There’s more to life than drinking, selling drugs and getting buried. We’ve got to teach them to appreciate the Detroit Symphony Orchestra [applause], the ballet [louder applause], the ah, ah, opera.” The congregation cheered at the prospect of their children’s trading da butt for Debussy.
In an effortless transition, Holley went from the secular to the sacred, preaching on the story of Hosea, which he transformed into a dialogue between the prophet and God, with himself playing both parts. When the Lord (Holley) tells Hosea (Holley) to marry a faithless woman, Hosea protests: “God, you’re tellin’ me to marry a prostitute!” (“And I know a lot of y’all can relate to that,”) he added, to loud laughter.
The congregation grew silent again as Holley led to his dramatic conclusion. “God,” he screamed in anguish. “This woman has broken my heart. But she hasn’t broken my love.”
“And that’s the way it is with us, here in Detroit,” he said quietly. “God says, ‘I took black people off the plantation and gave them houses and cities, mayors and leaders. And now they’re killing each other, hating each other. They broke my heart, but they haven’t broken my love.”
There was a chorus of amens, and suddenly everyone joined hands. A young black man standing next to me took mine, fixed me with a sincere stare and said, ‘Brother, God loves you and so do I.” Surprised, I managed to murmur “Me too,” feeling foolish. He released my hand, the choir began to sing “The Old Ship of Zion” and the angels of Little Rock Baptist filed out into the street, where the sinners were just starting to wake up from another Motown Saturday night.
Jim Holley is one of Detroit’s best preachers (the Free Press once ranked them, like college football teams), but his real interest is politics and community organization. He regards Martin Luther King as his “spiritual father,” and four years ago he headed the Jackson campaign in Michigan. He has obvious political ambitions himself, not an unreasonable thing in a city with so many divines in public life, and he uses his church as a base.
Like many fledgling politicos, Jim Holley is not averse to publicity, which is why he invited me to accompany him on his rounds one day. “We’re glad to have you with us this morning, Reverend,” he said when we met at his church. Although I was flattered by the honorific title, I didn’t want to mislead my host. “I’m not really a reverend,” I told him modestly. “In fact, I’m not even a Christian. I’m Jewish.”
Holley took the news with good humor. “I’m a rabbi myself,” he said. “A black rabbi. A Jewish rabbi serves only Jews, right? Well, my calling is only to serve blacks. We need to help ourselves.”
And yet, our first destination that morning was Temple Baptist Church, a wealthy white suburban congregation. Holley planned to ask its pastor for assistance in setting up several outreach programs. “They send missionaries to Africa, Reverend,” he said to me. “I want to get them to send a few to Detroit.”
Despite his prominence and his Ph.D., Holley seemed ill at ease when we arrived. We parked near the church, walked past its gleaming white pillars and entered the building. No sooner were we inside than we were startled by the loud ringing of a school bell. “That’s the alarm for when niggers are in the church,” he told his driver, only half joking.
The church secretary, a crisp, smiling woman, greeted us with polite confusion. According to her calendar, the meeting was scheduled for the following day. She ushered us into an audiovisual room while she went to call the pastor, who was taking the morning off. As we waited, Holley spread out his papers on the desk. “I’m sure that meeting was for today,” he said, “but maybe I misunderstood. I been in the battle for sixteen years and I still don’t understand white people. No offense, Reverend.”
The lady returned, full of apologies for the mix-up, and promised to reschedule the meeting. Holley gathered up his carefully drawn proposal and put it back in his briefcase. He seemed more relieved than annoyed.
On the way out, we conducted a quick, nervous inspection tour of the building. Holley looked wistfully at the modern classrooms and the auditoriumlike chapel with its color-coordinated seats. As we reached the entrance, another school bell rang, and children spilled into the halls. They regarded us with total apathy. Holley’s driver spotted two small black kids among the throng. “Hey, Rev, they got some of us out here,” he said in wonder.
Once this would have been a cause for rejoicing, especially for a man who regards himself as a spiritual son of Martin Luther King. But Holley is no integrationist. “It’s just an admission that we don’t have the ability to care for ourselves,” he said. “When we bus our kids to white schools, it just says we’re not able to educate our own children. Education doesn’t come by osmosis, it’s hard work. Being around white people doesn’t do it.”
On the way back to the city, Holley looked out the window at the green parks and neat homes and reflected on the lure of the suburbs. “Upper-middle-class blacks have the responsibility to reach back and help other blacks,” he mused. “They’re gonna let the middle-class Negroes have Southfield, keep the poor Negroes in Detroit. I can move my body to Southfield but not my soul. Isiah Thomas, all these other sports stars—here I am, having to ask white people for help. Why can’t I ask Isiah? He’s making enough. Most of these Negroes don’t even belong to the NAACP. They have moved body, soul and mind from the streets where they learned to play ball in the first place. This pisses me off to the highest pissitivity. They don’t do anything, man, anything.”
“Why do you call them Negroes?” I asked.
“Negro is just another word for nigger, Reverend,” he said. “Now that I have a wider audience, I have to be more polite.”
I asked Holley what he would do with the money he wants to raise, and he spoke about establishing church-based institutions—health-care clinics, recreational centers and especially schools.
“Negroes know how to sing—that’s nothing,” he said. “We got to teach our children how to play the harp, the violin. I want them to be cultured, to speak properly, to be able to compete. We in the church have a responsibility to them, but so far we’re just not making a difference. We’ve got to give them the right skills, and the right values.
“If someone in a family tells a teenage girl that pregnancy is all right, then that person must be made responsible for the baby,” he continued. “I had a seventeen-year-old girl come to see me, with six children—two sets of twins. Teenage mothers have no right to their children. White folks can’t say that, but it’s true. They ought to be given to an extended family member or to the state. Those kids are nothing more than walking zombies.
“Two years ago, I took seventeen young men down to Alabama State University and I registered them personally,” he said. “Three are left. One got thrown out for rape. Two more got thrown out for jumping on the pizza boy. Some people we just can’t change. We have to stop spending so much time on the generation we’ve already lost and put emphasis on those kids who are infants, the ones that can still be saved.”
As we talked, the car sped from the suburbs back into the city. We hadn’t passed any checkpoints or border signs, but when we looked out the windows we saw another country of burned and blasted houses and knots of aimless-looking young men on street corners. Holley shook his head with sorrow.
“This is a strong city, although it appears weak,” he said. “The strength is in the spirit of the people. In the last few years, there has been a hairline fracture of the spirit, but not a break. The problem is, we lack community. No white man in America is smart enough to do to us what we’re doing to ourselves—killing, selling drugs, raping, not teaching our children, not helping one another economically—every process, social, political and economic. But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can change things; the church can change things.” He was silent for a long moment, as he gazed at the city-scape, and then turned back to me. “Reverend,” he said, “if Dr. King could see this, he would weep, weep, weep.”
To many whites, all black churches seem pretty much alike, congregations full of ferver and rhythm. Within the black community, however, the differences—social, theological and ritual—are substantial. Jim Holley, with his burning social commitment, represents the activist wing; but at the Universal Liberty and Christ Temple, a small congregation on Detroit’s east side, a more personal gospel of salvation is dispensed. Its proponent, the Reverend Ralph J. Boyd, doesn’t mind rendering unto Caesar what is his, providing the rest is rendered unto the man known to his followers as “the Living Christ.”
Boyd is an elegant man in his late sixties who, despite recent heart surgery and the implanting of a pacemaker, fully expects to live forever. He came to Detroit from Alabama in the 1940s with his mentor, the estimable Prophet Jones, and he continues to preach Jones’s doctrine of eternal life on earth and prosperity for the faithful of the Kingdom, as his congregation calls itself.
Prophet Jones confounded his own beliefs by dying in 1973. But at his height, during the 1950s, he held his services at a converted downtown theater and claimed several hundred thousand adherents across the country. The Prophet boasted that he could heal the sick, predict the future and talk directly to God. It was he who established the essential theology of the spiritual church in Detroit, which includes not only the doctrine of eternal life and prosperity but the dictum that “God don’t like women.” Jones claimed that sexual intercourse with a female was a life-threatening sin; his detractors said that he simply wanted to keep the young men of his congregation for himself.
Eventually Boyd split with Jones and established his own church. Soon after, Jones ran afoul of the city’s morality laws and ended up in exile in Chicago. But his flamboyant style lives on in places such as the Universal Liberty and Christ Temple, and in other storefront sanctuaries throughout the city.
Boyd’s church is more elaborate than most, but it is still a modest edifice for a man who claims to be in direct, personal touch with God: blond wood pews, a small altar and walls decorated with neon signs—DIVINE GOD and 7 (God’s perfect number)—that look like beer advertisements. Adjacent to it is the House of Holiness, a combination sacristy, meditation facility and boutique where Boyd meets with congregants.
When I went to see him on a Saturday afternoon, there was a long line of people ahead of me. As I waited I browsed through the merchandise in his store, which runs to the exotic. Holy hyssop bath oil ($5.00), hyssop floor wash, Voodoo dolls ($3.25), Jinx Remover, Triple Strength Cast-Off Evil Incense, Holy Vision Bath Oil ($5.25), High John the Conquerer Soap (“It conquers all evil forces”), and cards inscribed with the Reverend Boyd’s revelations (sample: “I am, I am in perfect harmony with the law of prosperity”) for $2.50.
The label on the hyssop bath oil advises, “Read Psalm 51.” The psalm says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.” It was, I assumed, a figurative wish; Boyd’s followers are all black.
Off the boutique there were prayer rooms equipped with meditation couches and brass stands, where people leave written requests. I opened one and read: “Help me get a high-paying job. Give me health. And help me control my son.”
An attractive woman who used to be a high-fashion model in Europe and now serves as the Prophet’s secretary, informed me that he was ready to meet with me. She ushered me into a spare room where Boyd sat behind a desk, wearing an expensive-looking camel hair sport jacket and a blinding amount of jewelry. When I complimented him on his diamonds, he beamed. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” he intoned. “And we are each the Lord in our own world. The things that God put on earth, he put here for our use.”
Judging from the note I found in the meditation room Boyd’s followers—who include prosperous professionals as well as domestic workers and welfare women—want pretty much the same things as the Reverend Holley’s. But unlike the city’s more mainline pastors, Boyd doesn’t believe they can be obtained through works. At one point he considered opening his own school, but funds were not forthcoming. “I just brought my mind in instead,” he said. Communication with the holy spirits, prayer and the proper use of roots and herbs are his prescription for the social ills of Detroit.
Reverend Boyd, like his mentor, Prophet Jones, claims to be psychic. According to him, he can see, feel and sometimes hear the voice of God. “In Detroit people know of prophecies I have made,” he told me. “Sometimes it’s frightening. I fell out during a trance one time. My spirit went to Russia, to a very beautiful place where men were in conference discussing the world. A man at the head of the table said, ‘We’ll release an object that will give us up-to-date data.’ I came back into my body, and that night I prophesied that the Russians were going to put an object in space. The church was packed with people that night, dear. And the next week it was up there—Sputnik.”
The prophet didn’t have much time for me that Saturday, but before I left he offered to tell my future. He closed his eyes for a moment and concentrated. “You are a wonderful and beautiful person, dear,” he said. “You’re going to have great success. Amen.”
This sort of perceptive genius has won Boyd a large following in Detroit. Two hundred or so of the faithful, mostly well-dressed women and a smattering of men, were in church on a Sunday night in October. When I arrived, about eight o’clock, they were singing gospel songs and dancing in the aisles as they waited for the arrival of their leader.
After about half an hour Boyd entered from a rear door, wearing a vicuña topcoat over a splendid white silk robe. The singing and clapping rose to a crescendo as he was assisted out of his wrap by Angel Bishop Dorothy, a teacher in his College of Higher Wisdom, and assumed his seat, a thronelike chair that seemed entirely appropriate to his regal manner.
A few minutes later, the singing was interrupted for a reminder that the Kingdom’s Christmas would be celebrated on November 14, Reverend Boyd’s birthday (participation fee, one hundred dollars). Boyd smiled at the assembly with benign modesty. Then the church band, which included electric guitars, tambourines, drums and an electric organ, struck up “I’m a Royal Child, Adopted into a Royal Family,” and the dancing and singing re-commenced.
Finally, Reverend Boyd took the rostrum to announce a collection—the first of four during the service. Many of the people there made offerings all four times, and some had done the same that morning. Eternal life does not come cheap on the east side of Detroit.
After the collection, Reverend Boyd introduced Prophet Dawson, his ‘spiritual son,’ who was to deliver the evening’s main message. Dawson acknowledged the honor gratefully, telling the worshipers that “spiritual bread is baked by God, but delivered by the King,” and then launched into his sermon. A small, dynamic man with the stage presence and intensity of Wilson Pickett, he half sang, half preached his gospel of salvation through Reverend Boyd. There were no want ads, no admonitions about community solidarity, no calls for a new board of education from the pulpit—just straight, old-time religion, interrupted by an occasional commercial.
Dawson’s text centered on immortality: “The King teaches that it was not the plan of God for man to die. The Bible says, ‘The wages of sin is death, but the gift of me is eternal life.’ If you think you can live and you qualify, then there ain’t nothin’ you can do but live.” People cheered, shouted amen and beat on tambourines.
The primary qualification for immortality is the ability to call on spirits. Sometimes this is done by Boyd himself, sometimes on a do-it-yourself basis by the congregation. That night Prophet Dawson hollered and danced, cajoled and thundered in an effort to summon them, and as the service progressed, more and more people joined in.
After a time, Dawson paused to ask for a second offering to buy Reverend Boyd a new Mercedes Benz. “He’s a king,” he said, “and a king needs a chariot.” White-robed ushers passed buckets through the crowd, and women with callused hands snapped open their change purses to contribute to the royal transportation fund.
Following the second offering, Dawson stepped up the intensity another notch, and people began to fall out. A fat woman in a white pleated skirt and middy blouse danced up the aisles in total ecstasy, eyes closed and feet thudding on the threadbare carpet. She was quickly surrounded by other women who held their arms out to keep her from crashing into a pew. A young girl no more than seventeen, dressed demurely in a suit and small pearl earrings, stood rigidly at her seat and howled. Nearby a tall man in a black pin-striped suit began to chant “Thank you, Jesus; thank you, Jesus,” a mint Lifesaver bobbing on his tongue throughout the incantation. Ralph J. Boyd surveyed the scene with great equanimity, but a woman in a white hospital uniform and nurse’s cap peered closely at the congregation. From time to time she descended from the pulpit to lead one of the more emotional worshipers to a seat.
In the midst of all this frenzy, I was forgotten, although earlier I had been the subject of considerable curiosity. White visitors to the Kingdom are rare, and when I first came in, the congregants—perhaps mindful of Prophet Jones’s problems with the law—regarded me with a circumspect interest. Blacks are expert at looking at whites without seeming to, and I had felt, rather than seen, their scrutiny.
Now, however, transported by the music and the dancing, they were no longer concerned about outsiders, or about the outside world. They were applying medicine to wounded spirits, stoking their emotional fires for another long, hard week. One song led into another, the tambourines and drums providing a steady beat. People sat passively and then were suddenly ignited, like the houses I had seen go up in flame on Devil’s Night.
Prophet Dawson allowed the frenzy to continue for almost half an hour before he calmed things down again. He produced a white garment and a pair of scissors, and told the congregation that he had decided to cut up his robe (“blessed by Reverend Boyd”) and sell the pieces for five dollars each. Once again purses clicked open, and a number of people came forward to buy a patch of the garment.
No one seemed uncomfortable with this blatant fund-raising. At one point a visiting soloist told the congregation that Reverend Boyd was the first man she had ever seen wearing a full-length mink coat. The congregation shouted ‘Amen’ and Boyd himself smiled, taking the remark, correctly, as a tribute. “You have inspired me both spiritually and materially,” the singer told him.
It was nearing midnight, and although Dawson had issued mock warnings (“The spirit is in here and we just might stay all night”) things began to wind down. People were spent, and they sat quietly while Reverend Boyd addressed them in a surprisingly low-key manner. He talked about the need for prayer all through the week, not just on Sunday; reminded them again about Christmas, and prayed for the ill and shut-in.
When the prayer was concluded, the band struck up a tune that sounded very much like “Mamma’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread” and the congregation began to sing—“Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, a whole lot of money is coming my way.” They sang it over and over, while about thirty people lined up at the side of the church, each with twenty dollars in hand. One by one they approached the altar, handed the bills to the white-robed church ladies, and paused in front of Reverend Boyd, who cupped his hands over their right ears and whispered a brief, personal message to each one. It was a simple, practical benediction from the Living Christ on Earth—the lottery number for the week.
Later I discussed what I had seen at Reverend Boyd’s church with a friend. She is a woman of great sophistication, intellect and social consciousness, and I expected her to be outraged by the blatant materialism and egocentricity of the Living Christ and his doctrines. But she herself was raised in a holiness tradition, and she was surprisingly sympathetic.
“There are all kind of people in the black community, just like in the white community,” she said. “Not everyone can relate to a Martin Luther King, or the intellectual approach of some of the ministers here in Detroit. They need something, too, and they get it from the Reverend Boyds. When they give him money, they’re really just supporting their church. It’s basically no different then paying dues or a tithe to any other church; they feel that they’re getting something for their money. And besides,” she added with a mischievous smile, “you never know. Somebody’s liable to hit that number.”
Over the years, the essential religiosity of the black community has made Detroit a fertile ground for sects and doctrines of all kinds. Some, like the spiritual church of Prophet Jones and Ralph Boyd, have been introverted and self-centered. Others take a broader, harsher social view. The Nation of Islam was founded in Detroit by W. D. Fard in the summer of 1930; Temple Number One, ministered by the brother of the late Elijah Muhammad, is still located there. And, in the late sixties, the Reverend Albert Cleage established a nationalist denomination, the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church, as a militant alternative to traditional, white-oriented Christianity.
Cleage was deeply influenced by Malcolm X, and his church reflects the black nationalism and racial separatism of the Muslims. Its chief theological tenet is that Jesus was a black political figure; its main social doctrine, that integration is a pipe dream and that blacks must gain economic and political power to liberate and defend themselves from white oppression. Following the riot of 1967, Cleage terrified whites with talk about burning down the rest of the city; but, in recent years, he has toned down his rhetoric, if not his basic message, and his adherents have become a part of Detroit’s establishment.
Cleage, who Africanized his name to Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, has a significant national following. The sect does not divulge membership figures, but it has major churches in Atlanta and Houston as well as Detroit, where the membership of the Shrine of the Black Madonna is estimated in the thousands.
Most suburbanites (and some Detroiters) have never heard of it, but the Shrine is a powerful force in the city’s political life, a place where church and statecraft intersect. Its Black Slate endorses candidates, and sometimes runs its own. In the summer of 1988, in the Thirteenth Congressional District’s primary, the Black Slate put its muscle behind one of Jaramogi’s most faithful followers, Barbara Rose Collins.
At first glance, Collins seems like an improbable militant. She is an ample, almond-eyed woman with a round, pleasant face and a cheerful manner. But, despite her jovial appearance, she is, in her own words, the political creature of Jaramogi and his church. Professionally she uses her American name, but at the Shrine she is known as Makunda Najuma Fela. “That means daughter of a king, lovely to behold, and violent,” she explained. “I chose that last name—violent—because the time may come when we have to defend ourselves. The people who call me Makunda are the older ones, the ones who came through the struggle with me.”
In 1973, the Shrine and the Black Slate played a key role in the election of Coleman Young. Now, they were hoping to accomplish the same thing for Collins against one of the mayor’s closest allies, George Crockett. Young, who is politically indebted to the church, was officially neutral; but even with the mayor on the sidelines, few of the city’s political pros thought that Collins had a chance. Crockett was the incumbent and incumbents are rarely beaten in general elections, let alone primaries. It would take all of the Shrine’s energy and commitment to defeat him.
The Thirteenth District is a mixed bag. It is about 75 percent black and includes the WASP suburb of Grosse Pointe; neat, working-class neighborhoods, once known as “the black suburbs,” in the southwest part of Detroit; and the city’s east side, perhaps the poorest urban area in the country. On the Saturday before the election, I accompanied Collins to a settlement house meeting there, not far from the neighborhood where she was born and raised.
“Most of this city is like a national disaster,” she observed on the way to the meeting. “Drugs, crack, assembly lines shutting down—it all comes here first, the good and the bad. Whatever happens in America happens here first—Detroit is like a laboratory for the rest of the country.”
Collins was especially upset by the absence of black-owned stores along the crumbling business streets. “This is a phenomenon of the black community in Detroit,” she said. “It’s really a question of racism. Businessmen have learned that the blacks will go where they are—to the suburbs.”
Black economic self-sufficiency is one of the basic teachings of Jaramogi. The Shrine runs cooperative ventures based loosely on the Israeli kibbutz model, and it encourages its members to go into business. “We thought we could get it through political power, but we’ve learned that we need economic power, too,” Collins said. “Anytime you don’t have a major department store in a city this size, you know you’re oppressed.” It was a strikingly American criterion for oppression—the absence of a downtown Macy’s—but not a frivolous one; a great deal of the money earned by Detroiters is, in fact, spent in the suburbs.
There is a strong strain of Calvinism in the Shrine’s doctrine. “Jaramogi says that blacks have a different mind-set from whites because of slavery,” she explained. “When you work for massa, you work slowly, and that’s not good if you’re trying to hold a job. White people declared blacks to be inferior—and when we act it out, we turn that myth into a fact. If you are willing to work hard, you can accomplish anything you want. And if you have a black city administration, it’s our fault if the city deteriorates.”
Collins’s campaign was largely based on her ability to deal with this deterioration. She contrasted her local expertise with her opponent, casting Crockett as an apathetic absentee representative who spent most of his time dealing with foreign affairs. “People over here are interested in issues that are close to home,” she said. “I care about Third World issues, too; Jaramogi teaches us that nothing is as sacred as the liberation of black people. But first things first.”
Foreign affairs were not on the minds of the hundred or so blacks who came to hear Collins that afternoon at the settlement house. They were the substantial burghers of a disaster zone, and the candidate focused on their concerns.
“You sit on valuable land,” Collins told them. “You don’t like the way it looks, do ya?”
“No!” they hollered in unison.
“This was a beautiful area. What went wrong in Detroit? We lost our jobs and our young boys went to sellin’ drugs. And a new type of slavery took over—welfare. We’re supposed to be urban, but we’ve become rural—that’s how much vacant land we have here. Politics is power and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with it. Either you have it or you give it to someone else. We need to go up yonder where the money is, to Washington, D.C. And I need to get you excited.”
There were shouts of “Amen” and “Tell it, Sister Barbara” from the crowd. One by one they rose to testify to the difficulties of daily life. They complained about the lack of police protection, the city’s failure to demolish dilapidated houses, and the shortage of jobs. Collins listened with sympathy and, from time to time, jotted down a note.
An elderly woman in a white hat and pigtails rose and began talking about the new city airport that had opened nearby. “They say it’s supposed to provide jobs,” she said, “but if it provides jobs to the colored people like the highway does—forget it. You don’t even see a colored man digging a hole for a tree out there.” The audience murmured its agreement.
“It’s a disgrace, it’s the county’s fault and I’ll look into it,” the candidate promised. Once again, there was applause and scattered amens, but this time there were a few boos as well.
A man in a white painter’s hat rose from his seat and pointed his finger at Ms. Collins. “It’s very hard to see you when you’re not running for office,” he said. “You only come around at election time. What do y’all do on that council?”
“We can’t get a loan from a bank to put a roof on our house,” yelled a woman.
“Why don’t you folks on the council do somethin’ ’bout these drug houses?” called an old man. And, all of a sudden, everyone was shouting at once.
The chairlady, an officious woman with a large gavel, began banging for order. “You people just be quiet,” she said in a shrill, school-marmish tone. “Nobody has the right to talk unless I tell them to.”
At this, a stout woman in a floral dress stood up and shook an admonishing finger at the chairlady. “You don’t know how to talk to people. We’re not children, we’re citizens,” she said, and the crowd applauded. The stout woman turned to them. “I don’t know what y’all are so excited about,” she told them. “I been sitting here for a hour’s time and still didn’t nobody say ‘Thank God for bringing us here today.’ How many get up on Sunday morning and say, ‘I’m a child of God’?” This seeming irrelevancy struck a responsive chord; people began to nod and say “That’s right” and “Tell it.” In Detroit, religion is never irrelevant; amens syncopate the beat of the gavel at every public meeting.
Collins sensed the new mood of the crowd and smiled benignly. She is a church lady, and this was familiar turf. She began gathering up her notes and shoveling them into her oversized purse—it was early afternoon, and she still had a number of campaign stops. “Good luck, everybody,” she called to the luckless inhabitants of the east side. “God bless you and don’t forget to vote.”
In marked contrast to Collins’s frenzied effort, George Crockett was not even campaigning for reelection. Three days before the balloting, the waiting room of his office on Woodward Avenue seemed more like that of a small law firm than an election headquarters. Two secretaries typed quietly at their desks. One or two constituents sat leafing through old copies of Ebony.
Crockett had come back from Washington the day before. At the airport, he asked a cabbie about his chances and was told “Everything’s cool.” That was the extent of his polling. He planned to confine his campaign to a rare Sunday morning visit to his church. Like his old friend the mayor, George Crockett belongs to a generation of secular revolutionaries for whom religion is a matter of only passing concern.
The congressman’s self-confidence was based on more than the calculation that incumbents seldom lose. He is a legendary figure in Detroit, one of the founding fathers of what is viewed as black liberation. Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1909, he studied at Moorehouse College in Atlanta, and then took a law degree at the University of Michigan. In 1944, he came to Detroit as director of the UAW’s Fair Employment Practices Commission. Two years later he went into private practice, specializing in civil rights cases, and he became a partner in the first major integrated law firm in the United States.
As a lawyer, Crockett developed a reputation as a radical. He represented Carl Winter of Michigan and other American communists in a celebrated case in New York in 1949, and went to jail himself for contempt of court when he vocally maintained that the judge was hostile to his clients’ civil rights. He defended suspected subversives, including Coleman Young, before the HUAC, and worked as a defense lawyer in Mississippi in the sixties. Whites in the Detroit area say that he is a communist, although he calls himself “basically a socialist.”
In 1966, George Crockett was elected to a seat on the city’s Recorders Court. Three years later, he became involved in an incident that secured his place as a hero of the liberation movement.
The incident took place in March 1969, less than two years after the riot. A white policeman was killed by gunshots from the New Bethel Baptist Church, where a group of black militants were meeting. The police counterattacked, fired into the church and then broke through the doors. They arrested more than 140 people, some of them women and children, and held them in a police garage overnight.
In the charged atmosphere of Detroit, this kind of mass roundup could well have set off another riot. At this point, however, Judge Crockett intervened. He set up court at police headquarters, released 130 of the detainees against whom there was no evidence and, more controversially, nine who, nitrate tests showed, had recently fired a weapon. Crockett based his decision on the fact that the tests had been administered while the suspects were being held without counsel, a violation of their constitutional rights.
The judge’s ruling enraged the police department and the prosecutor’s office, which was fine with him. “Can anyone imagine the police invading an all-white church, rounding up everybody in sight and busing them to a wholesale lockup in a police garage?” Crockett demanded. The tough rhetoric, no less than the quick justice, won him the admiration of the black community.
Eleven years after the New Bethel incident, following the resignation of Congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., Crockett was elected to Congress. He was already seventy, and he proved to be a less than energetic legislator. Now, in the summer heat of primary week, he was noticeably tired.
In person, Crockett is an impressive, somewhat distant figure who had a hard time getting used to white people calling him by his first name when he went to Washington. Despite his socialist leanings, he has a decidedly bourgeois life-style (he and his wife, a physician, are leaders of Detroit society), which has removed him from the grinding realities of the east side.
I asked Crockett about the charge that he had neglected the gut issues of poverty in his district, which has one of the lowest per capita incomes in the country, and had spent too much time on foreign affairs. He looked at me through thick glasses, like a wise old owl, and shook his head. “I don’t think of Detroit as very poor,” he said.
A few days earlier, in a special report on the thirteenth District, the local NBC affiliate had called him “George Crockett, Third World congressman”—a reference to both his ideology and the devastation of his district. Crockett chose to take the reference as a compliment.
“Third World?” he mused. “Well, there’s something to that. Detroit is the black capital of the United States. When I first ran for City Council, back in 1965, I predicted that within ten years Detroit would be a majority black city with a black leadership, and I was right. One problem of postcolonial societies is a lack of prepared leadership cadres, especially in places like Angola and Mozambique, which were under Portuguese rule. We’re not quite that bad, but there’s room for comparison.
“We had a white outflow that I’m not aware has been duplicated in any other metropolitan area in the United States,” he continued. “There is urban-suburban animosity because whites lost money in running, and because they still want access to the library, the symphony, the ballpark, and getting to them is inconvenient. So, in that way, too, there is room for comparison to a postcolonial situation.”
Crockett’s district includes the decidedly first-world suburb of Grosse Pointe, but he is not exactly a familiar figure there. “I’ve been there twice I think, since 1982,” he said. “Those people don’t really need a Congressman.” He smiled with a grim satisfaction. “And never in their worst dreams did they think they’d get me.”
There were a couple of white candidates from Grosse Pointe on the primary ballot, but Crockett didn’t take them seriously; nor was he particularly concerned about Barbara Rose Collins. “In past years, I got about ninety percent of the vote,” he said. “This year I’m up against a Barbara Rose Collins, a real tough candidate … so I think maybe I’ll get, oh, eighty-five percent.” The hero of New Bethel leaned back in his seat and smiled the confident smile of a politician with a safe seat.
But Crockett was smiling too soon. On the Sunday before election day, Collins pulled a last-minute surprise. Hundreds of reinforcements, dispatched by Jaramogi, arrived by bus from Houston and immediately hit the streets to “leafletize” the Thirteenth District for the Shrine’s favorite daughter.
“You should have been in church when the people came,” she said at her headquarters on election night. “It was a holy explosion. It scared Crockett to death. That’s when his workers started spreading the word that I have a lot of Jews supporting me so they could get diamonds out of South Africa. They said I was for apartheid.” She shook her head at this absurdity, her “Barbara Rose for Congress” straw hat almost spinning off her flowing black hair.
The entrance to the Collins headquarters was guarded that night by bearded men in white shirts with identifying arm patches who form the Shrine’s security detail. The room was packed with modestly dressed women and neatly groomed men. They milled around the television sets and greeted one another with African salutations. An out-of-town friend of Collins regarded the scene with interest. “This fascinates me,” said the lady. “We don’t have anything like this in New Jersey.”
As the early results came in, it became apparent that the race would be very close. Fried chicken wings—the national cuisine of Detroit—were passed around, and Collins chewed on one reflectively as she went over the figures with several aides. Suddenly she set down the wing and began singing: “Nobody told me that the road would be easy, nobody told me that the road would be easy.” The others took up the song, and the room filled with gospel fervor.
Only the candidate’s mother seemed unmoved by the reverent mood. A spry, energetic woman dressed in modish good taste, she listened with wry dispassion as she sucked away on a black olive. When the hymn was completed, she punctured the silence. “Olives make you sexy,” she said loudly. “I told people that at my New Year’s party. Normally, now, black people don’t eat olives. But they ate up every one that night.” She laughed and took a big sip of Old Granddad from a paper cup.
The candidate’s mother gazed at the political groupies in the room. “People are just like cattle,” she remarked. “Barbara, this is the slowest campaign. Where are the results, girl?” Collins shrugged, and her mother turned to a press photographer for a discussion of horse racing.
Around eleven, the numbers began to roll in. Crockett had won—but by only a couple of thousand votes. The voters he considers “not very poor” had come out for Collins. If it had not been for the two white spoiler candidates, who siphoned off a small but significant number of potential Collins voters, the hero of New Bethel might well have lost his seat in Congress.
The guards stood at stoic attention while the Shrine’s campaign workers wrapped up their chicken wings and ballot sheets. There was disappointment on their faces, but it mingled with an unmistakable look of optimism. Like Fred Williams, they knew that things were building up on the streets of the Black Capital of America. For the moment, the secular revolutionaries were still in control, but there would be a next time. Two years from now, Crockett would be older, the city’s problems more acute, and Detroit might be ready to send to Washington a smiling Christian woman whose name means violence.