Paradise Valley

I was heartened to read that there will be a big turn-out for the internment of Rosa Parks in her adopted city of Detroit. The ceremony is already in progress back east as the fog rolls in here on San Diego Bay. The Reverend Jackson will speak the eulogy, and the Clintons are supposed to be in attendance.

I was born in Detroit, and my first memories are of the old city. Later, I always was a little proud that Our Fair City had a world-class historical figure living amongst us, even if the world of her neighborhood was light-years away from that of our white enclaves in the sprawling suburbs out Woodward Avenue and along the river to the east of the city proper.

I returned to the City for two years after college, starting out on my first grown-up job. It was interesting, seeing what had happened to the place since the 1967 riot. I can’t say that I experienced anything like the experience that Ms. Parks did, since I got the chance to live in another enclave, though it was a special one.

Rosa and her husband Raymond moved north in 1957, two years after she changed the world by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery Alabama bus. That sparked the bus boycott that lasted more than a year, and turned the spotlight on a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr.

The bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which was an all-white enclave back in the day. On Tuesday, the bus was draped in black.

Rosa was a quiet and determined woman of great dignity. But she was a troublemaker. 1955 was the second time she had been in trouble on a Montgomery bus. Twelve years earlier she had refused to give up her seat, and the driver simply ejected her. That was 1943, the year of the big race riot in Detroit that started on Belle Isle. Sailors from the Armory nearby joined white teenagers in starting the fight on the single bridge leading off the island into the city.

Police considered the matter ended at midnight, but it was only the beginning. Rumors flew. Whites had thrown a back woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge, went one. Another said a white woman had been raped. Over the next week gangs of whites and blacks clashed near Paradise Valley, the black enclave that ran up from the river, past the stadium where the Tigers Played, and it was virtually a war zone.

Six police were shot, and seventy-five wounded. Dozens of African Americans were killed in the fighting, which swirled across Woodward Avenue. A white Doctor was dragged from his car and beaten to death when he attempted to make a house call in a black neighborhood.

It was so bad that President Roosevelt sent in regular army troops, and they occupied Detroit for six months until Roosevelt felt it was safe to pull them out in January of 1944.

That was the neighborhood to which Rosa Parks moved in 1957, to an apartment on Euclid Avenue. She lived there quietly for years, working as a seamstress and later a staffer for congressman John Conyers.

My family moved out of Detroit not long after Rosa moved in. We lived in the suburbs, quietly, through the time of the riots.

After college, I rented the maid’s quarters in the Big Mansion in Palmer Woods, just about three miles and a world away from the Paradise Valley ghetto where Ms. Parks lived.

The wainscoting was rosewood, rather then the English Oak used through the rest of the place, with the carved plaster ceilings. It was an amazing residence, and was said to have belonged to the Burtons, of Burton Abstract and Title fame.

It had a real greenhouse, and two full master suites upstairs, and a slate roof and copper gutters. The windows were mullioned and looked down on a brick courtyard next to the three car garage.

The National Park Service has designated Palmer Woods a historic district, but it wasn’t then. The neighborhood was already well integrated, and Smokey Robinson lived down the street.

The houses could be had for a song. I think the Burton place cost around $50 grand at the time, a fraction of what the houses out in the suburbs were going for.

Rosa Parks lived quietly down on Euclid Avenue, and people were amazed to see her waiting in line at the drugstore. In 1994, a burglar broke into the house where she lived alone and roughed her up. The city fathers were horrified, and a place at the Riverfront Apartments was found for her.

It was more suitable. That is where she died on Monday, surrounded by loved ones. It is not far from what had been the black enclave of Paradise Valley, but it has a nice view of the River, and Canada to the south.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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