Cover Story
17
the neighborhood and we got on very well. Twelfth
Street had bakeries, a place that roasted peanuts, all
kinds of restaurants and clubs."
Hamilton checked on his business twice that fate-
ful night. By the second time, "the neighborhood
was an inferno."
An angry mob was forming.
"As I walked away, I heard my plate-glass window
break, but I had to keep going," said Hamilton, who
now owns Hair ExtraOrdinaire in downtown
Detroit. "The riots killed my business. People didn't
want to come there anymore. They were afraid."
REMEMBERING THE RIOTS from page
The Jewish Response
Walter Stark
Bloomfield Hills resident Walter Stark, 83, was
living in Huntington Woods and owned a
Southfield-based plastics company when the riots
started. He was at Pontiac Airport on the Sunday
morning after, waiting to take his leased plane for
a ride, when a Detroit News photographer assigned
to take pictures of the riot asked for a ride.
"We had instructions and special clearance
from the tower and the police," Stark said. "I
was instructed to fly above 2,000 feet, out of the
range of rifle fire. I saw the smoke and the guys
running around."
He said he didn't go out with the intention of
flying over Detroit, and his wife, Margaret, was-
n't too thrilled with his adventure, either.
A day or so later, Margaret Stark was shot at
while driving eastbound on the Ford Freeway. A
sniper's bullet went through her convertible's
windshield.
"That got me upset something fearful," her
husband said.
It wasn't long before he had some police bud-
dies give her shooting lessons.
The rioting and looting eventually spread through-
out a wide area. About 15 percent of the core neigh-
borhood storeowners were Jewish, but not all of the
78 Jewish-owned stores in the 25-block area were
victimized, according to Bolkosky, author of
Harmony 6- Dissonance: Voices of Jewish Identity,
1914-1967 (Wayne State University Press).
"A number of Jewish businesses were protected by
the people in the neighborhoods who worked for
them. They stood in front of the door," he said.
Murray Gittleman, 73, of West Bloomfield lived
on Webb Street in Detroit and had no fear of walk-
ing the streets before the riots. He was a third-gener-
ation pawnbroker, who opened Murray's Loan
Office on Warren and McGraw in 1954. About 60
shops did business in the neighborhood before the
riots; only 12 shops were left afterwards, he said.
His pawnshop was looted and burned to the
ground. Gittleman walked away. "I've never been
back to see what it looks like," he said.
Harriet Saperstein, 65, who lives in Detroit's
Lafayette Park neighborhood, never left.
The Cutlers
Amy and Ezra Cutler of West Bloomfield were
married on June 27, 1967, and honeymooned in
New York City. Upon their return, they stopped
at the Royal Theatre at Seven Mile and Meyers to
see Banning, a movie starring Robert Wagner.
In the middle of the movie, the house lights
went up. The manager went to the front of the
theater, looking agitated and nervous.
A hush fell over the crowd when he
announced, "Ladies and gentlemen, you know
what's been going on around the city. We're
going to have to close the show tonight, and we
want you all to drive directly home and don't
stop anywhere."
"We were still in our honeymoon bliss and had
absolutely no idea what was going on," Amy
Cutler said. "We asked other people, and they
looked at us as if we were from Mars. They told
7/26
2002
18
us about the rioting. The funny thing — we've
never seen the end of the movie."
She remembers what a shock the riots were to
her, her friends and the fourth-grade students in
Ferndale where she taught.
"We had the feeling we were so cushioned. We
didn't realize what the rest of the world, our
community, was feeling," she said. "Unfortu-
nately, we became very comfortable and didn't
reach out to other people outside our circle. It
was a real eye opener ... almost embarrassing to
learn that people living within our vicinity were
suffering," Cutler said.
"Unfortunately, this kind of civil disobedience
is not what you want. You want change done by
laws and acts of Congress. But I,guess it was the
only way they could get people in the communi-
ty to sit up and listen to them." LI .
She was a sociologist teaching at Wayne State
University in 1967. The week before the riots, she
was speaking to a group of young police officers as
part of a community relations study for the League
of Women Voters.
One of the young policemen asked her whether
there would be a riot.
After a very long pause, she said, "My silence is prob-
ably my answer. What I do know is that this is a tinder-
box. If something happens in Detroit, it will be because
some young policeman — perhaps sitting here — can't
handle a crowd situation and the sparks will fly."
She was in Aspen, Colo., for a physics conference,
when the riots started. She came back in September
to work on the east side for the Mayor's Committee
for Human Resource and Development, what used
to be known as the poverty program.
Saperstein and her family stayed in Lafayette Park
because she wanted to live in an integrated community.
"I care about Detroit, and I want to be part of the
solution and not part of the problem," she said. "I
felt I had something to give. It was a new urban
integrated area and that was important for me in
terms of how I wanted to bring up my family."
But she was in the minority. Debates still occur
over whether the riots caused many Jews to move
away from the city toward the suburbs.
"The riots were a coda to the migration of the
Jews from Detroit," Bolkosky said .
He added that the motivation to move from
Detroit changed from generation to generation.
"The only consistent thing about the Jewish com-
munity in Detroit was its movement northwest,"
which began in earnest in the 1920s, he said.
The Rev. Nick Hood III, 51, a City Council
member from 1994-2001, likens the exodus of peo-
ple from Detroit to the Babylonian exile. He quoted
the biblical verse: By the rivers of Babylon, there we