Full Transcript: Greg Kowalski on the Riot in 1967 and Racism in Hamtramck
Greg: That was a very interesting thing. First, let me tell you, the riots in Detroit started about two miles from here on the west side of Detroit and it started early on a Sunday morning at like two o’clock in the morning. Well there used to be a bookstore on Woodward Avenue and Seldon not far from the Detroit Institute of Arts that my family, we used to go there all the time time, we always thought, what a used bookstore it was a great place, it was incredible. And we went on Sunday afternoon, my dad and my oldest brother and I, went to the bookstore and we were gonna go on vacation and we wanted to buy some books and magazines to take with us on the trip you know. We were just gonna drive up north. And this is about two o’clock in the afternoon. And my brother came, he went outside and he came back in and he said to my dad, I think we better get out of here. And my dad said, why, and he said, come outside. And we went outside and the sky was filled with smoke. And he said, you know, let’s go. So we went and we didn’t even realize when we got home and put on the news that the whole west side over there and that was just blocks from where we were, was erupting and burning and turning into a riot. Now we left town the next morning, I think the neighbors thought we ran away but we were schedule to go on vacation. But my oldest brother stayed. And he stayed throughout the week over here. We watched it from the north and saw Hamtramck was not affected much at all by the riots. Because the city basically is an island and the city was able to park garbage trucks at the entrance, the main entrances to the city. Because it you really look at Hamtramck you’ll discover that most of the city is separated from Detroit by railroad tracks, by the expressway, by factories, there’s only one area of Hamtramck where you can literally walk across the street from Detroit into Hamtramck otherwise you’re gonna really need to get in a car and drive here. So we have a buffer around us. The city took out the garbage trucks parked them at the main entrance ways into Hamtramck and sealed them. And they closed the bars, you could not buy liquor, my brother was furious, believe me. So it really turned us into a little island and what we did basically was just watch as everything erupted around us and really on the west side of Detroit. It was pretty, pretty stunning to see that happening. I vividly remember that. In fact I remember we rented a cottage up north and there were some other people and we were talking to them and the other— I was like 16 at the time and I was talking to the son of one of the people there and he said, where you from and I said, oh we’re from Detroit and he said, oh you mean the burning city. I remember to this very day him saying that to me, I said, yeah you know because it was just national news, what was going on there, so. You didn’t really know what to make of it because you know that wasn’t the only riot, there were other riots. Los Angeles had burned, I think Baltimore had burned. This kind of stuff was happening, and this was— not exactly the same time, a little bit before, but Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in 68, Martin Luther King was assassinated in 68. This was all happening, this incredible turmoil was taking place all in that period over there. And you didn’t know what to make of it really. And then of course we had the hippie movement, which most people, because we were talking— that was an incredible societal division. Because most of the people that you would be familiar in a community like this would be the guys who were World War II veterans. And they couldn’t conceive of the concept of hippies they couldn’t conceive of the concept of someone being against the Vietnam War. Because they had fought in World War II and nobody could deny that that was a just war. We were fighting evil, and we, our soldiers, were good men fighting evil. That wasn’t the same situation in Vietnam. And they couldn’t comprehend the fact that we might have been wrong in that situation. So there were all of these different current going on at the same time. So, that was, even though we were in school, and we were in a Catholic school, which was even more isolated because in those days we were totally segregated, not be design, it’s just the fact that there were no black kids, and they did come in later, within a few years after I left they were getting black students. But so you, you know you saw it differently and you couldn’t make a lot of sense out of it especially here. Because in Hamtramck a lot of people who grew up here, or the immigrants who were here, lived side by side and some of them in the same house as black people. That was not unusual for, in the 1920s, for black people to own a home, live on one floor and rent the other floor to white people. So you had a degree of integration--not that there wasn’t segregation here there was— but you had a degree of integration here you wouldn’t find in most other places. And there’s a picture right over there of the police department from 1922 and you can see the black police officers and the black police detectives in 1922, that’s very usual. And our school system was totally integrated, the public school system, by the 1920s. And so again, I’m just trying to give you a sense of the conflict here. The conflicting ideas, the conflicting currents that were going on here, who is right? Who is wrong? You couldn’t make sense of a lot of it. Did we believe Vietnam? Were we right there? Fighting communism? On the other hand the more you learned about it the more you began discover that the people we were defending over there were the ones— the bad guys. They were the ones who were corrupt. And the communists were rising against them. So it was a jumbled mess. So that, you know, that had an effect.
It was more integrated in most places in general, I can’t tell you specifics, because I don’t know how much integrated they were. And you know Detroit was still a majority white city back in that period, especially when I was growing up in the fifties. But yeah I would say there was much more integration here. There was segregation here too. If you go to some of these places that used to be the department stores, they would have a food counter for the white people who could sit down, and a little stand for the black people who could order food. You know, segregated, separated. Which was totally wrong, you know, there’s no excuse for it, that was pure racism for that. And there were people, you know, who just did not like black people for no reason other than being racist. Yeah they did. There was racism here too. But I think there was a lot more— this sounds strange, but in my research what I tend to discover is that the people of Hamtramck looked at the black people in two ways, if you were a Hamtramck black person you were different from the Detroit black person. Those were the bad ones. The Hamtramck ones were the ones you knew, you grew up with, you understood them, they were your neighbors. Those ones in Detroit they were criminals and whatever. So there was a weird kind of distinction being made at that time.
It was more integrated in most places in general, I can’t tell you specifics, because I don’t know how much integrated they were. And you know Detroit was still a majority white city back in that period, especially when I was growing up in the fifties. But yeah I would say there was much more integration here. There was segregation here too. If you go to some of these places that used to be the department stores, they would have a food counter for the white people who could sit down, and a little stand for the black people who could order food. You know, segregated, separated. Which was totally wrong, you know, there’s no excuse for it, that was pure racism for that. And there were people, you know, who just did not like black people for no reason other than being racist. Yeah they did. There was racism here too. But I think there was a lot more— this sounds strange, but in my research what I tend to discover is that the people of Hamtramck looked at the black people in two ways, if you were a Hamtramck black person you were different from the Detroit black person. Those were the bad ones. The Hamtramck ones were the ones you knew, you grew up with, you understood them, they were your neighbors. Those ones in Detroit they were criminals and whatever. So there was a weird kind of distinction being made at that time.