Historical Photos Courtesy of Kenneth Stahl

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12th Street smoldering

You could
hear the sound of
the tanks going
down Gratiot. You
could hear machine
guns fi ring. It was
horrible. I didn’t
have a gun, but I got
a shotgun and kept
it by the bed. One
of my daughters has
never forgotten it —
that there was a gun
in the house that
night.

the brick wall. She was a
mess.”
Miller did something dra-
matic. He took Ms. Jackson
downtown and parked her
on Mayor Jerome Cavanagh’s
doorstep “so the mayor would
know firsthand what police
brutality looked like.” The
move got plenty of media
coverage. “The mayor never
forgave me,” Miller says.
Miller also filed a com-
plaint with the Civil Rights
Commission. It took years,
but Miller eventually succeed-
ed in getting the police officer
who brutalized Jackson cen-
sured.
“They got a black mark on
their record, and that was
it,” Miller says. “That doesn’t
sound like much but that was
the first time, to our knowl-
edge, that a police officer had
ever been reprimanded for
that kind of conduct. It was a
breakthrough.”

Wayne State University Law School

— Bruce Miller

DISCRIMINATORY
POLICE DEPARTMENT
Renowned civil rights attor-
ney Bill Goodman was visit-
ing his parents the day the
civil disturbance started.
As a young lawyer,
he had joined his father
Ernest Goodman’s law firm,
Goodman, Eden, Millender
and Bedrosian, which was

the first racially integrated
law firm in the United States
and concentrated on constitu-
tional and civil rights issues.
He had also spent some time
in the South, working on civil
rights cases at a small firm in
Virginia. When he returned
to Detroit, he handled police
misconduct and abuse cases.
Goodman said that as he
drove home from his parents’
house in Southwest Detroit,
he could see all sorts of
people streaming out of store-
fronts carrying things and
people being arrested.
“The riot, or as I prefer
to call it the Uprising or
Rebellion, because it really
was that, was the result of
police oppression of the
African American com-
munity,” Goodman says.“It
was clear to know that was
what it arose from: an all-
white police force policing
a large and growing African
American community and
doing so in a way that was
blatantly discriminatory.
“Young kids were being
detained. Cops were picking
up everybody based on skin
color and nothing else. They
were shooting people,” he
continues. “I ended up rep-
resenting a kid named Albert
Wilson who was shot in the
back and paralyzed because

he was in a store — at worst,
he was looting the store, but
you don’t shoot someone
for that. He was shot by an
unknown Detroit cop who
just left him on the ground
to die.”

REPRESENTING
ARRESTEES
“They arrested scores of people
and locked them up in a deten-
tion center and in tents on
Belle Isle, charging them with
misdemeanors,” Cohn says.
Goodman said people were
held at Belle Isle for days and
days and then brought in on
buses to Recorder’s Court.
“These were people who had
been guilty of nothing more
than a curfew violation —
somebody who had happened
to be out late at night,” he says.
Goodman joined with col-
leagues and friends in the
National Lawyers Guild and
gathered in Recorder’s Court.
“We waited for names to be
called and for people to be
brought up and volunteered to
represent them,” he says.
When they were over-
whelmed by the sheer numbers
of people, they assigned clients
to other lawyers as well.
“My firm was asked to pro-
vide volunteer lawyers,” Cohn
says, “so I spent a full day in
court representing the rioters.”

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14 April 21 • 2016

JCC buildings,
central offi ces of
the United Hebrew
Schools and Temple
Beth El were all
declared drop-
off stations for
nonperishables to be
distributed among
victims of rioting.
Jewish Family and
Children’s Service
has volunteered to
help homeless victims
fi nd shelter, and
Jewish attorneys were
well represented
among the lawyers
defending individuals
who had been
wrongly arrested.

— Detroit Jewish News

