In 1967 long-simmering racial injustice reached a breaking point in the city of Detroit and exploded into what is sometimes called, rather clinically, a civil disturbance. It ended after five days with forty-three people dead, many times that number hurt, and some seven thousand people arrested. Even after more than fifty years, it is considered one of the worst riots in United States history.
A Presidential commission appointed to investigate the riots in Detroit and several other cities concluded the primary cause was white racism. “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” its report said. “Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.”
Things haven’t changed all that much.
In Detroit, in addition to local law enforcement, U.S. Army troops and the National Guard were deployed. Among the latter was my Uncle Dan. I was just a kid, but clearly recall that at least once during those five chaotic days he came out to our safe suburban home, pulling into the driveway in a pea green military jeep. He wore green fatigues with his last name stenciled over the left shirt pocket. Several other guardsmen accompanied him. I found their arrival both exciting and frightening: exciting because real, armed National Guardsmen were at my house, but frightening because real, armed National Guardsmen were at my house.
We lived twenty miles or more from the violence, but my Uncle Dan – my father’s brother – probably wanted to be sure we were all okay. He lived with his family, my aunt and cousins, in a small town about an hour away from us. I don’t know for sure, but he may have been attached to the National Guard in a spiritual capacity: in civilian life, he was a minister. Was he armed that day? It would seem contrary to his divinity school training. Even if he wasn’t, his comrades most certainly were.
We invited them inside and my mother served coffee. Their conversation, surely, was guarded in my presence. After half an hour or so, they got back into their jeep and left.
About a year later, the riots over, we visited Uncle Dan, Aunt Ruth and their kids. We were there in church when Dan delivered that week’s sermon. I don’t remember much about it, but do remember he urged his (presumably) all-white parishioners to look into their hearts, more deeply than they might wish to. Would they find traces of racism?
To underscore his message, he related a personal experience from the riots. During a brief lull, he said, he and a few of his fellow guardsmen, maybe the same guys who came to our house, stood along the street. A car driven by a white man passed by. The driver shouted out, “Get one of those blankety-blank n-words for me!”Uncle Dan shouted the words too, startling the congregation. Then he added, with an irony I could not miss, “But he’s a good man. He goes to church every Sunday.”
He really did say “blankety blank,” sparing his parishioners offensive language. But he did not really say “n-words.” Instead he used the actual slur, in all its toxic, pulsing ugliness.
It took a few years for the double standard to dawn on me. It was acceptable, from the pulpit, to use an undisguised racial slur, but not to use whatever “blankety-blank” substituted for.
My uncle Dan died in the summer of 2022, decades after these events. While his fundamental decency and humanity has never been in doubt, that tiny slice of his sermon, that mental sound bite, has always stayed with me. No judgment is intended in recounting it here. One of the reasons he used that epithet, I think, was to challenge a complacent flock, and shock them into some soul-searching. In later life, in the same situation, he might have phrased things differently.
A few days after Dan died I phoned my Aunt Ruth. Her sense of loss was palpable. “I feel so lonely,” she told me.
“It’s odd, the things you find yourself remembering at times like this,” I said. I did not describe that sermon, or even Dan showing up at our house at the height of the riots. Instead I recalled how, a year or two after that, she and Dan were in an automobile accident in which Dan broke his back. I remembered seeing the two of them soon afterward. Ruth was not much worse for wear, but Dan wore a metal brace around his torso, fastened with a tiny padlock – to prevent him, maybe, from removing the brace in his sleep.
“Oh, yes,” Ruth said as I described this. She seemed almost pleased. “You’re right! I can see it now, in my mind’s eye…”
I remember other visits too, unshared with Ruth in that call: one when Dan drove me around the block on his motorcycle (I wore a football helmet), and another, in winter, when my cousins and I were ice-skating on a pond. The skating ended abruptly after Dan heard some rowdy teenagers nearby, swearing – using some blankety-blanks. “I don’t have to listen to that!” he snarled to Ruth, as we kids were hustled away.
Before my call to Ruth ended, she told me the smallest things now could reduce her to tears, so she was trying to keep busy – contemplating, after sixty-four years of marriage, how to live the rest of her life alone.
Dan’s was not the only death in the family this summer, nor even the only death of someone close to us. There are always too many departures. It may be inevitable, but death is never welcome.
