2270 Atkinson
Category Archives: Biography
I Met My Husband in the Library – April 25, 1966
In late April of 1966 I was 19 and a sophomore at Wayne State University in Detroit. Northern High students walked out of school on April 25 to protest the way they were being (or not being) educated. Several other inner city high schools walked out in sympathy. Northwestern organized a supporting boycott and my sister, Pearl, was a leader. My father and others were providing adult support.
I usually studied in the sociology room of the Main Library, which was in the middle of Wayne’s campus. As I was leaving to go to my next class that day, a guy came up and asked if I was Rev. Cleage’s daughter. I said I was. He asked if I was leading the Northwestern boycott and I said no, that was my sister. We made arrangements to meet after my class on the picket line in front of the Board of Education Building.
We did and afterwards sat around for several hours talking in the “corner” in the cafeteria at Mackenzie Hall. The “corner” was where black students congregated. I felt strangely comfortable with Jim. Strange for me, anyway, since I didn’t feel comfortable with anybody, unless I was in a political discussion. He tried to convince me to join a sorority and convert the members to revolution. There wasn’t a chance I was going to do that. He also told me that he was “nice”. I asked if he meant as in some people were “revolutionaries”, he was “nice”. He said yes, that’s what he meant.
Michigan State Police
Additional Complaint Report
Page No. 2 Complaint 99-133-66 file 1.15 Date 4-25-66
(note: seems to be continued from a lost page)…students take part in the meeting and form plans by themselves. Representatives from the following Detroit High Schools were present and pledged to back the walk-out, Cass Tech, Central, Chadsey, Cooley, Denby, Mackienzie, Mumford, Northwestern, Southeastern and Western.
Advisers to the students at this meeting were; Reverend Albert Cleage and Reverend Cameron Wells MED. The school representatives most active at this meeting were; Micheal Bach____, 17, Negro male of Northern HS, Pearl Cleage, 17, Negro female of Northwestern HS and Stanley Parker, 17, Negro male of Southwestern HS.
April 25, 1966: The “Freedom School” session (sic) were held in the day. No police incidents.
At 4:oo PM a demonstration and picket line formed at 5057 Woodward Avenue, the Board of Education building. The demonstrators carried signs demanding upgrading of the education at Northern and other inner-city high schools.
There were about 75 persons demonstrating. About 14 adults appeared to be parents of students, about 12 young people appeared to be high school students, the remainder of demonstrators were persons identified as members of such groups as SNCC, Young Socialist Alliance, Detroit Committee to end the War in Vietnam, Students for a Democratic Society and persons seen at Socialist Workers Party Forums.
The following persons were identified in the picket lines: _____ Allen, Kenneth Cockerel, Edward D’Angelo, Todd Ensign, Robert Higgins, Derrick Morrison, Marc ____, David Neiderhauser, Sol Plafkin, Micheal Patrick Quinlin, Harvey Roes, Sarah Rosenshine, Charles Simmons, Mark Shapiro, Tom____, Peter_______, Jackie Wilson and James Winegar.
April 26, 1966: The students met at the “Freedom School” at 8:00 PM a meeting was held. They returned to the classes at Northern High School. Representatives of the students and the school authorities are going to continue meeting to improve conditions.
__________FAST FORWARD TO APRIL 26, 2012_________
Today, April 26, 2012, I received this email from a community organizer in Detroit about a student walkout yesterday.
“Today, 180 students were suspended for walking out of Western HS yesterday. Their cell phones were taken from them and messages and numbers were gone through by security. The police deleted numbers and messages from the students’ phones.
This month, Frederick Douglass Academy students walked out over constant turnover of teachers and shortage of supplies. The principal being fired was the catalyst in this student lead walk out. The secretary of the school was ultimately fired, as well.
Mumford HS students walked out, refusing to have Mumford put into the Educational Achievement Authority (failing district). The students were suspended and the teacher who told them they are not failures was fired for allegedly encouraging them to walk out.“
To read more about the present walkout on huffpost go to Detroit Student Walkout.
To visit a website with information by the involved students about the freedom school that starts today (Friday, April 27) and more, click Southwest Detroit Freedom School. The article is on the left side and there are more links at the bottom of the article. I’m cheered to find organizing going on in response to what happened. Almost makes me wish I was in Detroit.
There is no May Pole in this post but there are a couple of Demonstrations that I think will represent May Day.
Celia Rice Cleage Sherman 1855-1930
This post is a combination of information I found through records and memories of my aunts and uncles about their grandmother Celia. She died before I was born so I never had the chance to meet her.
Celia Rice was born in Virginia about 1855. Her father was a member of the Rice family and her mother was enslaved on the Rice plantation. She was brought to Tennessee when she was small. By the time I asked, nobody remembered her mother’s name. She was about ten when freedom came.
My aunt Gladys said that when Celia was a child, she had to walk around in the sun. The masters wife did not want her to be confused with the white children of the family, who she resembled.
On April 23, 1872 Celia Rice and Louis Cleage were married in Athens, McMinn County Tennessee. They moved to Louden County, TN where their five children were born over the next 11 years. Josephine “Josie” was born in 1873. Jacob was born in 1875. Henry was born in 1877. Charles Edward was born in 1879. My grandfather, Albert, was born in 1883. Louis did farm work and Celia did house work. She was unable to read or write.
My uncle Louis said that Lewis C. worked all day for 50 cents. Celia worked all week for 50 cents. He often spent his on good times before he got home. Many nights he spent in jail – drunk – playing the guitar and singing!
The marriage doesn’t seem to have been a happy one and by 1899 they had split up and Celia married Roger William Sherman, a carpenter, in Athens, Tennessee. She was 45 years old. By 1900 oldest daughter, Josie, was married to James Cleage (Different Cleage family, not related but off of the same plantation.), a teacher and they had several children. Jacob was not at home in the 1900 census. Edward, Henry and Albert were at home and all students. Celia could read. She had birthed five children and all five were living and doing well.
After her husband died, Celia lived with her son Edward and his family in Athens, TN for some years and then she moved to Detroit where her other three sons lived.
My uncle Henry said she used to give him an apple every once in awhile and slip him a nickel. He was her favorite. My aunt Gladys says they used to stop by her room sometimes and she would try to show them how to tat and crochet and it was kind of interesting, sitting on her bed, watching.
My Aunt Anna says, Grandma Celia was in Detroit for a while…making the rounds between uncle Henry, uncle Jake and ours….She would get tired of one house and occupants…complain and move to another... there was a Rev. Rice… he was a big shot in the Presbyterian Church… he came to town in a blaze of notoriety….to speak at some church… Granma [Celia] wanted to go…but Daddy wouldn’t hear of it! His name and picture were in the paper…Anna said she saw the paper and that he looked just like Granma.
My uncle Henry remembers one time his Grandma Celia wanted to go back to Athens. “….and Daddy said he could not send her to Athens. And they went on for about ten years and then, pretty soon she said, well, I’m going to Athens if I have to go up and down the street and beg. He was fussing and hollering and she said ‘I am going to go to Athens. I am going to go home.’ And finally he had to give her the money to go. I guess it just gets in you sometimes. You know, living with us was no picnic. She had to go and he didn’t have the money.”
I have been unable to find a death record, certificate or burial information for my great grandmother. She was living with my Grandfather Albert Cleage in the 1930 census. Going by the Memories of my Aunt Anna, she must have died soon after.
My Aunt Anna remembers being about 5 and in the kitchen when Granma Celia had a stroke. She was sick for quite awhile before she died. She remembers when Celia died they laid her out in the living room…Henry was a broken man! She places Henry at about 13 years old.
Once I worked in a sewing factory
I graduated with a BFA in December of 1968 and caught the Greyhound bus out of town right after Christmas. At the time, it was the only way I could figure out to leave home. My true love was living with someone else. My parents would not look kindly on me moving to my own place in Detroit, so I hit the road. I first went to San Francisco. Stayed about a week. The person I knew out there had returned to Mississippi. Decided to head to Washington D.C. where my sister was a student at Howard. I hadn’t enjoyed the 5 day bus ride out so I caught the train east. I stayed in my sister’s dorm room for a week or two, until one of her play writing teachers hooked me up with a friend of his in New York City, a woman from Belgium who taught French at Columbia University.
I caught the train to NYC and took a cab from Grand Central Station to her apartment on Riverside Drive. I remember looking out of the apartment window one evening, listening to Joni Mitchell singing “I’ve looked at Clouds” coming from another apartment. I stayed with her a week or two, got a job doing clerical work. Met some of her friends. Tried hash. Whoa. Moved to the YWCA when her mother came for a visit. Went through the blizzard of 1969. Got a letter from Jim and decided to go back to Detroit. I took a plane.
Some first thoughts on arriving back were that Detroit was the dirtiest place I’d been. Gray and dirty. I moved back in my mother’s and got a job at the newly opened Church sewing factory. It was just the sort of job I wanted. I didn’t have to give it any thought so I could devote my mind to planning and plotting other things. There were only about 4 of us working there, sewing African print “mod” clothes. I felt a connection to my seamstress ancestors while working there.
Several weeks later, I moved out, much to the consternation of my parents, especially my mother, who would have rather I discussed it with her first instead of the late night call I made telling her I wouldn’t be coming home. After staying in the Black Conscience Library for a few days (there was a living quarters), I found an apartment and discovered it wasn’t that hard to move out and be on my own. I felt a great weight off of my mind, being on my own. I worked there sewing for almost a year before leaving to become a revolutionary librarian and have my first daughter. I was 22.
Going Out – 1937
This photograph was taken in the alley beside my grandparent’s house on Theodore in Detroit in 1937. My grandfather, Mershell, was 47. He stands here with his daughters dressed for church. He worked at the Ford Rouge Plant, taking the street car to work everyday and saving the car for going to church and other weekend activities. Mary Virginia, my mother’s older sister, was 17 and a senior at Eastern High School, on East Grand Blvd within walking distance of the house. She graduated in June and in September went to Business College where she excelled in typing. My mother was 14. She graduated from Barbour Intermediate School that year and joined her sister at Eastern High School. Here are their report cards from that year.
Meanwhile, a lot going on in the world in 1937. The montage below contains photographs of some. The Memorial Day Massacre when Chicago police shot and beat union marchers who were organizing at Republic Steel Plant. Ten workers died. Amelia Earhart flew off and disappeared. The German Luftwaffe bombed Guernica, Spain during the Spanish Civil War in support of Franco and inspired the painting of the same name by Picasso . The Japanese invaded China, killing and raping thousands. Roosevelt was re-elected. The Hobbit was published. Gone With the Wind won the Pulitzer prize for Margaret Mitchell. The first animated full length film, Snow White came out. An anti-lynching law was passed. The Golden Gate Bridge was completed and opened with a day for pedestrians to walk across. Buchenwald concentration camp was build. The Hindenburg exploded and burned. King George VI’s coronation took place. Auto workers in Flint, Michigan won recognition for the UAW after a prolonged sit down strike. The Mississippi and Ohio Rivers flooded leaving devastation and death behind. Ethiopia was now in the hands of fascist Italy.
I Once Was a Brownie
When I was in the second grade I became a Brownie for a few months. At the time my father had left St. Marks Presbyterian Church with 300 members and founded a new church, Central Congregational church. We met at Crossman School on Sunday and held all other church activities at 2254 Chicago Blvd. We also lived there. It was a huge house. That was my sister and my bedroom window on the upper right. Perfect casement windows for Peter Pan to fly through.
The scout troops met in the basement recreation room where all of the youth activities were held. We wore the usual Brownie uniform and used the usual Brownie handbook. I remember only one event, a jamboree held at Roosevelt Elementary School in a small gym, up a short flight of stairs above the 2nd floor. There were various stations set up and we went to different ones and did different things. After several months I quit because I was bored. I wish I had a photo of me in my Brownie outfit, but I don’t.
At some point I was in the kitchen, which we shared with the church, while my mother was making dinner. One of the Brownie leaders came in to prepare a snack and asked where I’d been. I told her I wasn’t coming any more. That was my experience as a Brownie. One more thing I remember. A little girl at school, which was majority Jewish at that point, said there couldn’t be any brown Brownies. I don’t remember who she was telling this to but I told her, yes you could be because I was a brown Brownie.
Input from Benjamin Smith, one of the scouts pictured below:
“Between Scouts and Youth Fellowship, I spent a lot of years in the parsonage basement. It was a different time. The side door was unlocked until your father went to bed.”
“I am the taller kid in the rear. All of us in that picture went through Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts and Explorers. Sadly, I am the only one still here. John Curry, standing, left front. Ligens Moore, seated front. Norman Cassells, seated front right. Harrison Stewart, standing with rope, front right. Benjamin Smith rear left. Longworth Quinn rear left. Ligens had a pilot’s license at 12 yrs old. Longworth’s father published the Michigan Chronicle for many years.
“The girl scouts from left to right, are Andrea Keneau, Ann Page, unknown, Laura Mosley and Janice Mosley, deceased (and Laura’s older sister.)
I remember Longworth. In 1969-1971 we both worked with the Black Conscience Library. He was in Law School at the time. Such a long, long time ago.
Times were different but I remember that someone tried to break into the house one night when my father wasn’t home. My mother rapped on the upstairs window with her ring – they were in the backyard trying to break in through the french doors of the conservatory – and they fled. Pearl and I were asleep. When she called the police they said she shouldn’t have knocked on the window, but she was so mad at the nerve of them. They would have been so angry if they had gotten inside and found nothing worth stealing.
My youngest son joined the Boy scouts. He was an active member of a troop in Baldwin, Michigan for some years. They did all the scout things, camped out, went on hikes, earned badges, went to Jubilee at Mackinaw Island. He earned the Sharp Shooter, Swimming, Water Skiing and the Polar Bear badge to name a few. To earn the Polar Bear Badge he had to camp out two nights in a row in weather below freezing, preparing all their meals at the campsite. As I remember it was in the 20 degree range. My husband became the troop treasurer and continued in that capacity long after my son lost interest. He also camped out in the 20 degree weather. They were a pretty free-spirited group and never wore uniforms so I have no photos of him in scout gear. My older children were in 4-H clubs.
My Mother in the News
My mother, Doris Graham, was in the news quite a bit during her years at Eastern High School in Detroit. Some were from the school paper, “The Indian”. Some were from “The Detroit Tribune”, a weekly black newspaper published by my mother’s cousins, James McCall and his wife Margaret. I have other articles “starring” my mother but I am just using those from 1937 – 1940. The others will appear later. The articles were saved by my grandmother Fannie, Doris’ mother. The writing on them is hers.
My mother was a teacher
My mother was 36 years old and had been teaching for six years at Roosevelt Elementary school when it was taken. My sister and I attended Roosevelt. I had my mother for a Social Studies teacher when she first began teaching. We pretty much read the book, “Someday Soon.” and answered questions. It was not very interesting. She improved a LOT as she went through twenty years of teaching.
Her last teaching assignment was at Duffield Elementary school, where she taught reading using the Distar method. She loved it and taught it to me and I used it to teach all of my children to read.
I found the writing below in one of my mother’s notebooks. It isn’t dated and I don’t know if she wrote it after retirement or before or what she was planning to do with it.
Each year when school begins I see again the many ways in which my children are alike. I am equally impressed with their differences. Close on the heels of these feelings comes the realization that once more I must try to build with each child the kind of relationships that will make it possible for me to teach him.
Children ask themselves many questions about a new adult. Is she friendly? does she smile often? Does she really mean what she says? What does she expect of me? Too much? Too little? Can I be myself with her? Or must I pretend to be what she has already decided I must be? Will she listen when I am happy or in trouble or need help? Or will she always be too busy?
Satisfactory answers to these questions will mean satisfactory learning experiences for a child. Unsatisfactory answers will mean no learning – or even worse the learning of things that must later be unlearned.
It was a warm afternoon. The sounds of children at play came in through our open windows along with the good smell of newly cut grass.
My forty odd second-graders, (who come to me for two distressingly brief forty minute periods each week), were eagerly writing with crayons on small pieces of lined paper. Rough desks and clumsy crayons made writing difficult, but they settled to their pleasant task of writing for me their first and second choice for group work. We had been studying transportation as groups. Now according to our plan, we were dividing ourselves into groups of seven or eight to paint, draw write plays, poems, or stories, or create in clay about airplanes, boats, subways, cars or trains – whatever appealed the most to us. We had decided to use crayons instead of pencils because it took less time to pass crayons from a large box than it took to pass each one his own pencil.
As I walked among the crowded seats helping when I could, I came upon a small boy in a front seat. His paper was empty. His small fists were clenched on his desk. Leaning down to keep from disturbing others I asked, May I help you Julie?”
His close-set blue eyes were intense and unblinking as he raised them to me and said between clenched teeth, “I can’t do it.”
Thinking that he wanted a neat paper and knew that this was well-nigh impossible with crayon and rough desks, I said reassuringly, “Don’t worry about how it looks this time. Do the best you can.”
His hands did not move as he stared as his paper.
“I’ll never help him on the playground if he is in a fight – I don’t care if he is getting beaten, I’ll never help him.”
Work had stopped and forty pairs of eyes watched us unwaveringly.
“Who is it that you won’t help, Julie?”
He pointed silently to the boy who had passed a crayon to each child from a box of assorted colors. Julie’s jaw was set – his face moist, “I hate purple. He gave me a purple crayon I can’t stand it.”
Here was a child who brought to school a brilliant mind (At 7 he could read on a fifth-grade level) burdened by countless problems at home – over-worked parents building a small business, a senile grandmother, constant competition for recognition and affection with her as well as with older and younger brothers.
I stooped beside his desk. “We didn’t know that you don’t like purple. What color would you like to have?”
“I don’t care – but not this one! He opened his fist and showed a purple crayon moist from a small hand’s clenching.
All eyes were fixed on me as I rose from Julie’s desk. Their tension now was almost as great as his. I walked to the cupboard and returned with a green crayon. “Will this one do?”
He took it without a word and began to write his choices.
I looked over his head at the children. They smiled gently and I smiled back. We had taken another step on the road to good learning.
_______________________________________________
The inspiration for this post came from reading “Fearless Females Blog Post: March 12: Working Girl” on the blog The Accidental Genealogist.
The Thief of Baghdad and a Negative Inverted
When I saw the theme for this weeks Sepia Saturday was film, I wanted to post a photo from a movie I remember wandering into one evening when I was about 4. We lived in St. John’s Congregational Church parsonage/community house in Springfield, Massachusetts where my father was pastor. Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the movie. I remember waking up from my nap and going down the hall to a big room where the movie was being shown. There I saw a larger then life, green genie coming horrifyingly out of a bottle. Perhaps it was “The Thief of Bagdad“, released in 1940. By 1950 it could have been available for showing in darkened rooms full of folding chairs to community groups. I did not stick around after the Genie started coming out of the bottle.
However, this movie is not sepia and it’s not from my family photo stash, so I kept looking. Finally I remembered finding an envelope of negatives (film) of me, my bear, Beatrice, and my grandfather, Dr. Albert B. Cleage Sr. They were taken in the Summer of 1948 in our backyard.
Politics – Earliest Memories 1952
Week 46. Politics. What are your childhood memories of politics? Were your parents active in politics? What political events and elections do you remember from your youth?
My sister and I – 1952
My first memory of politics is the 1952 presidential campaign. My parents supported Adlai Stevenson and I remember waking up the day after the election and asking who won. I was quite disappointed when I found it was not Stevenson.
For more about my family and politics, click on these – 1965 Cleage for Congress and Elections Past.