CHAPTER 1
Lorita, Looking Back.
Let me introduce myself. I'm Lorita Harrison, Jason Harrison Junior's sister. Emma, our mother, is the wife of Jason Senior. I'm a social worker and historian in Lake Union City. After receiving my doctoral degree, I moved here in 1976 to be with my family. Over many years here, I have come to love this City, and especially our Fourteenth Ward. In the coming pages you will learn about my family, as well as many other fascinating people. For now, though, I just want to set the stage, so to speak, for the many, often surprising, places, and events to come — the stage on which all our joys, dreams, sorrows, struggles, victories, and passions play out. At the outset, I must add that in a number of places in this extraordinary development there will be unpleasant events and times.
I will start with some background information about this surprising Fourteenth Ward Community in Lake Union City. Then, I will lead you through some, though by no means all, of its early development, before turning to more than fifty years of striking, recent history involving its place in America and the World.
Lake Union City's earlier history came when runaway slaves first settled on a dirt road, with a few old, empty houses, running from the lake inward into the otherwise unoccupied Ward. That was about 1840. After the Emancipation Proclamation, and end of the Civil War, a few more free slaves joined them along with immigrants from some other countries and some poorer Ward residents. The free slaves and others supported themselves by working in agricultural fields. In 1900 that road was paved, and named Freedom Lane. And by then it was part of a much larger racially, and ethnically diverse community. Some descendants of the first slaves were later able to relate something about that early history when they met with the larger community at our beachside meetings every year.
The incorporated part of present-day Lake Union City proper has an area of about forty square miles, with about forty additional square miles of suburban or semi-rural political districts beyond. Overall, it is a fairly typical New England development, with the exception of the Fourteenth Ward, as will become clear as our stories unfold.
Lake Union City got its name because of two early glacial lakes on its west side. These lakes were originally filled with water flowing southward from the melting continental glacier receding to the north. The glacier eventually disappeared about 20,000 years ago. The two growing lakes were joined into a single lake by progressive submergence of a narrow, shallow connection between them that eventually reached a depth of about twenty feet, as it is today. Hence the name Lake Union City because it developed along the joined eastern shores of the two original lakes. The two large lake basins reach two to three hundred feet at their greatest depths. Across the Lake from the City lie natural forest slopes.
The Fourteenth Ward stretches narrowly for about eight miles along the eastern shore of Lake Union, and extends inward into the City for two to three miles. It is the original and oldest part of the City, and the only part along the Lakeshore. Development began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with quite large and elegant houses set back from the Lake along a narrow dirt road leaving a wide, and beautiful, natural area of scattered large trees and open spaces between the road and the Lake. Further development created more residential roads, eventually streets, inland with smaller, but still fine, houses. The first name of the area was Primrose. In 1910, when Lake Union City with multiple wards was created Primrose became its Fourteenth Ward. When the road along the lake was later paved it was named Primrose Street.
In the early Twentieth Century most of the Fourteenth Ward entered a steady physical and economic decline because most commercial and residential development went on inland, and because foreign immigrants, and particularly AfroAmericans, settled into smaller houses in many parts of the Fourteenth Ward. No doubt, cultural, ethnic and racial biases had a lot to do with the avoidance of the Ward by many, though not all, wealthier Caucasians.
Most prominent early on was the settling into the Ward of Middle Eastern families from Iraq, Syria, and Turkey in the nineteen twenties after the First World War. Unlike the present, angry, often violent interactions of the Muslim, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawhites, and others, did not occur. All got along well in the Fourteenth Ward, creating a sense of universal belonging that has helped the Ward avoid some later hostilities elsewhere in America. An area of restaurants and small shops along South Street, and a bank on the corner of South and Prospect Streets, became known as the Monsour District. It was named after that wealthier part of Baghdad, Iraq. Quite a few more people came to the Monsour District in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, along with other Middle Easterners.
During the period of the Ward's economic decline, real estate agents intentionally steered foreign and AfroAmerican customers to the Fourteenth Ward, and Caucasians, whether more wealthy or not, to other wards. The far eastern neighborhoods of Lake Union City soon became the areas of greater wealth. So, it became a segregated city in several ways. With similar dedication, realtors also steered wealthy, educated Caucasians to the suburbs. People of many more backgrounds eventually chose to live in the Fourteenth Ward: Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, and more. Deterioration of property in the Ward continued to a lesser extent. Real change was coming.
Awareness of their depressed situation caused the Ward's people to talk a lot with each other, and they began to organize sometime around 1970. First, there were just friendships blossoming among neighbors of all backgrounds. During the 1970s wider groups formed clubs of many kinds, and in the fall of 1979 the first "All Community Gathering" on the Lake shore was organized by the newly formed Fourteenth Ward Citizens Association. Hundreds gathered with food, and music, and unending conversation, not to mention quite a bit of dreaming. Jason Senior and Emma arrived early that year to have their house on Primrose Street, just in time to be part of that Gathering. It was like a whole new life had opened up for them.
Those Gatherings continued every year, but much more was happening. Plans and money had been obtained to construct a waterfront complex farther up shore with docks, a swimming area, and a large picnic area. Next to it a small shopping unit of four stores for clothing, pharmacy, hardware, and foods was created.
Shortly after I arrived in 1981 my biggest surprise came at the third Community Gathering when I started talking with five teachers from all four schools in the Ward: preschool, elementary, middle, and High. These teachers were all excited about their teaching and the students. All had experiences elsewhere, but each said they had never experienced schools with this potential, such diversity, and near absence of discipline problems. One said; "The students learn so eagerly and fast, it makes my head swim. I have to work really hard every day to keep up with them." Two of those teachers had recently moved from across the City to the Ward. I realized two positives were at work here: The amazing diversity of student families and their backgrounds, combined with the attraction for really good teachers and administrators. Back then the quality of our schools was mostly unknown or denied elsewhere in the City, but that all changed as you will learn. And the result of that change will be some hard fought battles to keep our schools. At that Gathering I also met a very intelligent and charming professor at the Fourteenth Ward University named Sung who is the result of an amazing escape from North Korea.
This is not to claim that all will be positive with the Ward in the future. It will be surrounded, and at times hit, by the festering, often volatile, troubles that increasingly welled up in America, and the world, in the late twentieth and twenty first centuries. Still, what follows reveals the Fourteenth Ward in many dimensions, that for decades it has been a truly unusual place in America, and still is despite all the surrounding troubles in our Country and World.
I think the most remarkable, the most unusual, part of the origin and development of the Fourteenth Ward is the complex mixture of geographical origins, economic backgrounds, races, religions, and ethnicities that gradually came together over decades. It seems unique that in America such a complex, self-aware, and strikingly peaceful community should arise. Nothing is more striking than the diverse geographical origins of its people: from Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Middle East, North Korea, Central America, Asia, Africa, and others.
Now let us begin, in 1968, at our Dad Richardson's gas station in an economically depressed, impoverished, and racially isolated part of Detroit, Michigan, where Jason Jr and I grew up, when a horrible war abroad, Vietnam, was unfolding.
I'll offer a brief comment at the start of each of the episodes in this story.
CHAPTER 2
Starting at the Gas Station, Detroit 1968.
Here we begin with events a long distance in space, time and culture eventually leading to the Fourteenth Ward. It makes clear how the surprising backgrounds of our family eventually came to the Ward.
It had been a quiet afternoon at the gas station in Detroit until two loud gunshots startled young Jason Harrison and his father Richard out of their chairs. They ran to the front window of the office. A short distance down the far side of the street they saw people on the sidewalk running away from the little convenience store. A black man with a pistol in his right hand rushed out of the store grasping his bloody right shoulder with his left hand. He ran with wobbly gait down the sidewalk, crying out in pain. Drops of blood fell from him as he rounded the next corner. The owner of the store came slowly onto the sidewalk holding his gun.
Richard chuckled, "Jason, that robber's a stranger for sure. Anyone living around here knows you don't try to rob Martin's store. Each day Martin appears old and slow moving, He looks helpless sitting alone behind his counter and cash box, but he always has his pistol, loaded and ready on that shelf below the counter. He never shoots to kill, though once he hit a robber in the heart by mistake, and that white guy got no farther than the curb. That man's death bothered Martin for months. He kept saying his eye caught something outside the window at the last instant and made his aim crazy."
They continued to watch as people resumed, moving almost normally along the street as a police car with siren blaring pulled up in front of the store. Martin, still on the sidewalk, started talking wildly with the two officers while he excitedly kept pointing in the direction the gunman had run. After five or so minutes writing their report, the officers climbed in their car, and raced off in the direction the robber had fled.
As Jason and Richard remained standing at the window it is striking how different father and son are. Richard is slender at six feet like the outstanding basketball player he once was, while son Jason, who plays football in high school, stands at six feet four with a build of solid muscle. They look different in other ways. Richard has very black skin, with numerous streaks of gray in his black hair, and he is clean shaven. A few soft lines cross his cheeks giving him a pleasant, reflective appearance. Jason is a lighter brown color with thick, bushy, jet black hair, a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. He looks younger than his eighteen years.
After the police drove off, Richard walked to his desk in a back corner and resumed sorting receipts. After a few more minutes watching people following Martin back into his store, Jason returned to work at a small table in the opposite corner next to the vending machine. He kept switching between work in his notebook, and staring out the window. Each time he looked out he was fascinated by the passing of old, rusty cars, and the variety of pedestrians of many shapes and sizes, both sexes, and a few children. Almost all were black, probably his neighbors, yet he knew only a few of them. He mused; ours is a strange world where people live so near each other, in all these little old rundown houses jammed together along narrow side streets, with no real sense of a larger community. No way to join together and put a stop to crime, dirty streets, lousy schools, and all the rest. It so cheapens the quality of our lives. Does it really have to be this way?
As a large, shiny, new-model limousine came swiftly toward the station Jason muttered: "Wow! A drug man or gun seller for sure." His father looked out at the limo just when it was right in front of them.
"What did you say, Jason?"
"Nothing really, Dad. I was just watching that fancy limo. Don't see many of them here."
"One is too many, son. You can be darn sure it's not the mayor or governor visiting us. Likely someone with a business that makes our neighborhood worse than it would be without him. I mean a guy like that who can afford a chauffeur, and the two bodyguards in there with him, is at the root of half our problems."
"Yea, that's what I suspected."
"Well, I suspect you're not getting that school work done. Just because its a little less than two months to graduation doesn't mean you can slack off. You are mighty lucky you got into Technical High School. Your success at that school is the reason Wayne State accepted you, and that kind of college education will make all the difference for the rest of your life. These are times when a black man with solid education can get ahead in the world. Not like it used to be. For years I feared that you and your sister would wind up in our ghetto high school. Before she died, your mother was your teacher, and she made up for the bad early years of grade school here. Bless her, dead now these three years."
"I know you're right. This is math and I have it under control, though I don't really like math or science. They're not about the real world, you know what I mean, about what affects everyday lives of people who can't afford leisure. Like most, if not all, of these ordinary people going by. I want to study things in college that make a difference for people."
No sooner had he turned back to school work, when his attention was grabbed by a car pulling alongside the gas pump. It was Garson's old Ford that he had repaired more times than he could remember. He watched his father walk out, pump the gas, and clean the windshield. Garson got out to pay, and the two men talked for at least ten minutes. He could hear them laughing once. They had been friends for years. One of the few neighbors you really counted on. As he watched them Jason recalled how Garson volunteered to help out at the station when Richard was in the hospital for his hernia repair five years ago, and that he was a pall bearer at his mother's funeral. A good man, but pretty much poor like the rest of us. But just like now, he almost always had that ready smile on his clean-shaven, chocolate-colored face.
Over the next hour light rain fell as dusk quickly descended. Three more cars came for gasoline. When the third customer drove out Richard turned off and locked the pump. The rain had increased, and it had gotten colder causing Richard to finish quickly and hurry inside.
"Jason, if you'll lock up in here and turn off the outside lights, I'll go back and fix supper. I'm taking the cash back to our safe. A little later I want us to listen to something on the radio that should interest you. It will probably have a lot more to do with your future than mine."
"What is it?"
"Just wait and see. Oh, by the way, I called Martin. He's alright. When he shot the robber that guy's gun went off, but his bullet just went into the ceiling, as he almost fell down before he ran out. That explains the two shots. I didn't think Martin would try to kill him."
