<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: The Mayor's platform was "A porkchop in every fridge"
Review: and Sunnie Wilson lived up to that motto by giving back generously to the black community. His motto might also have been "a bed and good meal for every musician" because he owned and operated the Mark Twain Hotel expressly for that purpose. BB King, Dizzy Gillespie,Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and many more stayed there. Sunnie also ran several show bars in Detroit's "northern" Paradise Valley. The book contains hundreds of stories having to do with musicians whose names are very common today. He was also very influencial in the political climate of the 1930 and 1940s in Detroit, and provides much insite into those times. Some of his greatest successes occured in the rich entertainment district that centered around John R, where today the Detroit Medical Center sits. To understand the history, you have to read the book, almost nothing remains of what was sometimes called the "near eastside ghetto". A great read. It reads like a novel, but leaves you with hard facts that easily pop up in conversation, and give perspective into the future.
Rating: 
Summary: A Lost Paradise
Review: Sunnie Wilson was like the John Dancy's and the Francis Kornegay's of the Detroit Urban League: High-yellow blacks who loathed the dark-complexioned blacks. If you don't believe me, read E. Franklin Frazier's Black bourgeois, or Victoria Wolcott's Remaking Respectability.
It was not my intention to linger on the issues regarding Wilson's conspicuous story, rather than to make the point that Wilson belonged to a particular elite social circle that was set apart from the common black folk of/in Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. Albeit not stated in my theses, it is my belief that one of the reasons that Black Bottom fell was because black elites abandoned the community in time of real need. Instead of coming together to forge a political strategy to battle Mayor Jeffries infamous Detroit Plan, Black elites (with the aid of a 1946 Supreme Court ruling) fled to the suburbs, and Idlewild.
Wilson's story is an important source in Black Bottom historiography because he forces us to rethink the hiring practices of Detroit Urban League, where Forrester B. Washington, and other black community leaders, believed that light-skinned women seeking employment - as opposed to the those of darker skin tone - were more attractive because they "were as a rule girls who have had better opportunities than the pure blacks who were mostly southern girls from the rural districts." This reductionist viewpoint allowed leaders like John Dancy to place light-skinned women employees in coveted positions in effort to improve the image of African American female workers in Detroit. In other words, the Detroit Urban League - composed mostly of color-conscious, "high-yellow" blacks - funded by wealthy whites, allowed themselves to become the filtering station for the white establishment to scrutinize and choose the type and kind of blacks they would allow to enter their workforce. And who would be better suited for such a job other than the black bourgeois, whose main goal and objective was to be loved and accepted by white folks. Now, one could argue that the Detroit Urban League had simply played the cards they were dealt (as Richard Thomas might would argue), or one could argue that the Detroit Urban League could have done more to challenge the racist, paternalistic, and patriarchal actions of the white establishment, and pushed for a more humanistic approach to solving the problems of employment affronted the black southern migrant - both dark and light-complected.
Wilson's book forces us to look at these problematic issues that would, in my opinion, ultimately cause the fall of a great and unprecedented example of perhaps the most impressive black community the world would ever know. Wilson was part of an elite circle of (high-yellow) black folk that fleeced the black community in the same way that Jews had historical done. And when Black Bottom and Paradise Valley began to see hard times, rather than bond together their resources, influence, political power and wealth, the rich and elite black folk (including Wilson) packed their bags and fled the scene. Wilson would like to make us believe that it was black crime ("Soon I made up my mind that I could no longer do business in a section full of dope peddlers and petty criminals") that pushed him away from his responsibilities toward the black community revitalization movement, but it was probably the opportunity to retain his elite ties and lifestyle that ole Sunnie - a high-yellow elitist - saw the benefit in heading up north to forge together a community of "well-to-do black cottage owners and vacationers." Wilson reveled in the joy and prestige of rubbing elbows with the black rich and famous, who would become regular attendants of Idlewild: Dr. W. E. B. Dubois, Madame C. J. Walker, Charles Waddell Chestnutt, and Dr. Daniel Hale Williams who originally owned the island from 1915 to 1916 before giving it to his sister, Virgil (whom Wilson, consistently obsessed with color, describes as "a very light-compected woman..."). As I read Wilson's story, I became somewhat convinced that part of the reason that Black Bottom and Paradise Valley "became a victim of 'slum clearance,' or what became known as urban renewal," was because the black community's most vital resources -black wealthy elites - abandoned it. Rather than see the benefit of fighting to restore, rebuild, and revitalize the fledgling black economy (fledgling since the riots) the black economic power-base (the Barthwells', the Gordys', The Roxboroughs' , the Wilsons' ) closed ranks and hit the dirt running. And the "big-money interests like Mr. Webster and the J. L. Hudson family bought up parcels of land," while, "to make way for the I-75 freeway, the city decimated Black Bottom and Paradise Valley."
Today, a comfortably retired Wilson unapologetically recants his act of treason: "I thought the takeover was wrong, but sometimes you can't fight 'progress,' especially when you are poor and your adversary is armed with the power of millions of dollars." But Wilson, like his friends and associates, were wealthy, or at least, collectively wealthy, which meant power. Rather than fight, they ran to the suburbs and Idlewild, while the less affluent blacks in Black Bottom watched their lives crumbled beneath the mammoth city-owned bulldozers.
<< 1 >>
|
