The Great Migration North to Detroit

In what was the largest internal migration of any group in American history, the Great Migration saw six million African Americans migrating from the South to the North drawn by improved economic opportunities and hopes of a better life. Black Americans were also escaping segregation and discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws in the South.

Another factor for the diaspora was the release of the movie Birth of a Nation in 1915 which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force protecting the purity of white womanhood against sexually aggressive freed slaves after the Civil War. The D.W. Griffith film opened to nationwide protests and demonstrations.

"Birth of a Nation" still. The Black man was played by a white actor in blackface.

 

After a private screening, President Woodrow Wilson released a public statement calling the film "Unfortunate." With the film's general release, the South experienced a resurgence of KKK domestic terrorism driving more black Americans North. Most of the migrants were unskilled laborers and service industry workers--not rural farm workers.

From 1910 through 1929, Detroit experienced the fastest growing African American population in the United States--a 611% increase. During the same period, New York City had a 66% increase and Chicago had a 148% increase. Blacks settled primarily on Detroit's lower east side in minority isolated neighborhood called Black Bottom--originally named by the French for the dark, fertile soil found there. The area adjacent to Black Bottom became Paradise Valley--famous for its jazz clubs.

Black migrants found fierce competition for living space in Detroit's worst neighborhoods which became segregated slums. Living conditions in Paradise Valley and Black Bottom were bleak with the oldest wooden dwellings in the city--many dating back to the 1860s. Fire was a constant hazard. The buildings were owned by white absentee landlords and were poorly maintained. Old hotels and row houses were subdivided into small apartments and boarding houses to increase profits--many without plumbing facilities.

Thinking they had left "Jim Crow" laws enshrining segregation and racism behind, blacks found that in Detroit they were confined to "red lined" neighborhoods backed by real estate covenants preventing them from moving into Detroit's established white neighborhoods or suburbs. Blacks found that racial discrimination and white supremacy were entrenched in the North just as they were in the South.

But there was a significant distinction between the North and the South for blacks in this era. In the South, white people didn't mind living in proximity with blacks. The plantation culture depended upon it. But white people didn't want to work next to blacks. The North was the opposite. White people tolerated working with blacks, but they didn't want black people in their neighborhoods.

The assembly line

Early on, black women overwhelmingly worked in domestic service jobs. Eventually, clerk positions opened up in the retail industry for them. Black men worked in the service industry at hotels, restaurants, passenger trains, and public works. The jobs paid little, offered no fringe benefits, and provided no chance for advancement. Labor shortages during World War One opened up good jobs in shipyards, foundries, steel mills, auto factories, and meat packing. Unskilled black laborers took the most undesirable and dangerous jobs wherever they were employed.

Henry Ford

When Henry Ford announced the Five-Dollar Day in 1914, he also ramped up the hiring of blacks to fill vacancies in the Highland Park Plant. Employee turnover was a problem, and black workers were willing do jobs others would not. This set many black workers on the road to modernity. Beginning in the 1920s, Dodge and Packard began recruiting black workers too.

With improved economic conditions, a black inner city culture developed catering to the needs of African Americans. Churches, markets, bakeries, barber shops, hotels, beauty parlors, clinics, jazz clubs, and adult entertainment developed. But every white and black Detroiter knew where the color lines were and woe to him that crossed them.

The high cost for African Americans penetrating the color line in Detroit is exemplified by the Dr. Ossian Sweet affair in 1925. As a youth in Bartow, Florida, Ossian witnessed the lynching of a black man in 1911. The angry white mob strung up the man while he pleaded for his life. The vigilantes doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. The crowd cheered when the flames enveloped him. Traumatized, the Sweet family moved to Detroit as part of the Great Migration. 

Dr. Ossian Sweet and his wife Gladys

 

Ossian Sweet managed to secure an education and attend medical school at Wilberforce Academy in Ohio. Between semesters he worked in Detroit as a bellhop at several hotels--one summer he was a vendor at Bob-Lo Island Amusement Park. Dr. Sweet and his family were part of a new demographic--upwardly mobile, black Americans. As a young doctor at Dunbar Memorial Hospital, Sweet wanted to escape the confines and squalor of Detroit's minority-isolated inner city. Dr. Sweet bought a home on Detroit's east side in an all-white, working-class neighborhood.

When word spread of the purchase, whites viewed the incursion into their neighborhood as a violation of their "sacred" real estate covenant. The day the Sweet's moved in, a mob of "neighbors" assembled outside their home on September 8th, 1925 and cursed them with racial slurs. On the second day, the crowd grew to several hundred angry whites. Dr. Sweet and his family were joined by Sweet's two brothers and seven other friends--no doubt for a house warming get-together and a show of moral support. The hostile mob surrounded the house and started throwing rocks and bricks through the windows.

The sound of shattering glass terrorized the group and prompted Ossian's brother Henry to fire two shots at the mob--the first above their heads and the second into the crowd. Leon Breiner took a bullet and died. The Detroit police were conspicuous by their absence until the call went out that a white man had been shot by a black man. Everyone in the Sweet home was arrested, taken to jail, and tried for conspiracy to murder.

Clarence Darrow

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) retained the best lawyer in the land--Chicago civil liberties attorney Clarence Darrow. The first trial lasted four weeks and ended in a mistrial. The second trial focused only on Henry Sweet--the shooter. The prosecution pushed for a murder charge, but the defense insisted that a man's home was his castle, and he had every right to defend it. Henry Sweet was acquitted.

The Sweet trials were a referendum on race relations and segregation in Detroit ushering in a new era of political activism. But the graphic incident showed the risk of violating the city's red-lined neighborhoods. When it became clear to whites that black people were breaching their segregated neighborhoods, growing numbers of white Detroiters began to relocate to the expanding suburbs north, south, and west of the city in a demographic shift known as white flight.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The Great Migration slowed during the Depression but picked up again with the coming of World War Two. The Selective Service took many white and black males out of the work force to serve in the military. The war represented a turning point in black employment prospects. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed executive order #8802 creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) mandating nondiscrimination in defense industries and government jobs. Industrial work began to eclipse service employment for black men. By the end of the war, African Americans held 8% of defense jobs, up from 3% before the war. Despite the gains for black men, black women were still relegated to domestic work and low wages.

The United States Congress debated making the FEPC permanent, but Southern legislators cut off funding and shut down the program in 1946. It took another twenty years before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established to address many of the same issues.

World War II helped transform Detroit's social geography. Several distinct black communities emerged based on income, occupation, and status within black Detroit. Many African Americans fortunate enough to flee the crowded city center left as soon as they could; the rest were left behind to bear the brunt of being trapped in the city's worst housing. Detroit's shifting racial borderlands became battlegrounds for the future of the city. This racial frontier put blacks on a collision course with their white counterparts.

"Detroit Lost Neighborhoods: Black Bottom and Paradise Valley"
https://fornology.blogspot.com/2016/01/detroits-lost-neighborhoods-black.html

Before Berry Gordy There Was Joe Von Battle Producing Records in Detroit

Joe Von Battle in his Hastings Street record shop

Joe Von Battle was born in 1915 in Macon, Georgia and moved during the Great Migration with his family to Detroit, Michigan. In his teens, he worked doing odd jobs in Detroit’s famous Eastern Market until he found work with Detroit Edison digging trenches and burying electrical lines. During much of World War II, Joe worked double shifts. One shift at the Hudson Motor Car Company and the other shift at the Chrysler Plant across the street. When the war ended, Joe was permanently laid off like many African American workers, displaced by White veterans returning from the war.

Joe Battle vowed to be his own boss and never work for anyone again. He added Von for a middle name as a young man, emulating European film actor Erich Von Stroheim, who he admired. When Battle opened his record business, he realized the middle name Von was helpful on his business cards, obscuring his African American ancestry. In 1945, a narrow grocery storefront was vacated at 3530 Hastings Street in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood on the lower Eastside, Joe Von Battle stepped in and opened Joe’s Record shop.

Joe outside his store

In 1948, Joe Von Battle purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder and made a makeshift recording studio in the back of his shop. There he recorded artists like John Lee Hooker; Washboard Willie; pianist Detroit Count, who recorded “Hastings Street Opera;” Tamp Red who recorded “Detroit Blues;” Louisiana Red, Memphis Slim, Kenny Burrell, and many other country blues musicians.

Joe Von Battle recorded the final songs and sounds of the people who migrated north for a better life. His shop specialized in records that appealed to African Americans from the rural South who left to work in the automobile or steel industries for a better life. Country blues traveled with them. Joe is believed by music historians to be the first African American record producer in the post war period recording on the JVB, Von, and Battle Records labels.

His record shop played host to Detroit’s itinerate blues musicians. Typically, the music was performed live by a singer with his guitar and maybe a washboard and a harmonica player for accompaniment. Country blues was raw and rooted in the struggle for survival in a world of inherited misery. It sung about poverty, loss, suffering, desertion, death, booze, and loneliness. Country blues had its feet firmly grounded to the earth and rural life.

 

 

Joe recorded another style of music with a hopeful spiritual message born out of the same misery—gospel music. Joe was most proud of almost one-hundred sermons he recorded of legendary pastor C.L. (Clarence La Vaughn) Franklin at the original New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street down from his record shop. On Sundays, Joe would broadcast Reverend Franklin’s sermons on speakers set up outside the shop. His storefront always attracted a crowd.

Probably the most precious recordings he ever recorded were eight hymns sung by Reverend Franklin’s fourteen-year-old daughter Aretha before she signed with Columbia Records in 1960 secularizing her music. When Aretha Franklin signed with Atlantic Records in 1966, she was paired with producer Jerry Wexler who helped her become the Queen of Soul.

Aretha Franklin performing

In 1956, the Federal government announced the construction of the National Interstate Highway System spelling doom for Hastings Street, the heart of Detroit’s African American business community and further down Hasting’s Street Paradise Valley, Detroit’s legendary blues and jazz entertainment district. The construction of I-375 was a useless 1.062-mile spur that ran parallel to I-75. When the Black business community was uprooted, the financial health of many successful African American entrepreneurs was cut short.

The transition prompted a Black diaspora to the 12^th Street area on Detroit’s Westside, creating overcrowding and increased racial tension in the city. The Black community was boxed in by real estate covenants and red lining, restricting their free movement around the city and the greater Detroit area. There was a distinct colorline that Blacks begrudgingly conformed to. Within its confines, the African American community struggled to make the best of a bad situation.

Joe Von Battle moved his record shop to 12^th Street in 1960, but by that time there was a new sound dominating the radio and television airways of Detroit threatening his business. “There is a different generation now,” Joe told the Detroit Free Press. “All they want to buy is that Motown stuff with that beat they want to dance to. Today, young disc jockeys won’t play the blues. They say it’s degrading,”

Berry Gordy brought a polished professionalism and aggressive promotion to his Gordy/Tamla/Motown record labels. The new urban sound was sleek, suave, and sophisticated appealing to a broader, younger, crossover audience. The content of the music changed from the tough realism of country blues to lyrical, hard-driving rhythms and strong choral arrangements with a pop music flare which listeners could dance to.

The modern male and female groups wore fancy, matching outfits and danced synchronized choreography to the music. The Motown sound was tailormade for television and radio, taking the new music from Detroit’s Westside to the rest of the country and the globe.

Not only did the music change, the record industry changed also. In the 1960s when the chain department stores established record departments, they began selling rhythm and blues singles and albums. Rhythm and blues had entered the mainstream. Independent, specialty record shops could not compete. Black record stores struggled to survive.

Then on July 23, 1967, to add insult to injury, 12^th Street erupted with racial strife and conflagration. The first night Joe protected his store with a shotgun but the second day he was ordered by police to evacuate the premises and allow the authorities to restore order which took a week.

In the meantime, Joe’s business was looted, torched, and hosed down by the fire department. When Joe and his family were allowed to return to the record shop, the smell of charred wood and melted vinyl hung heavy in the air. Twenty years of tape-recorded blues history, Joe’s life work, went up in smoke or was washed into the street.

Looters oustside of Joe's shop in July 1967

           

Joe’s daughter Marsha laments that “Some of the most significant voices in recorded history were on those melted records and fire-soaked reel-to-reel tapes. Thousands of songs, sounds, and voices of the era, most never pressed into vinyl, were gone forever. I believe Daddy died that day. My father’s alcoholism gravely worsened after his life’s work and provision for his family was destroyed by looters and rioters.” Joe suffered for years with Addison’s disease and died a broken man in 1973 at the young age of fifty-seven.

Marsha Battle Philpot, aka Marsha Music, wrote a biography about her father to document his music legacy. Marsha brought Joe Von Battle's story back to life in 2008 in her Marsha Music: The Detroitist blog. She writes about Detroit's African American history and culture on her blog.

Marsha Battle Philpot also has published a beautifully written book of poetry and prose titled The Detroitist: An Anthology About Detroit dealing with the era of Detroit's White flight in the 1950s and 1960s and its impact on those left behind.

Marsha Music's Blog

Detroit Boxer Joe Louis' Place in American History

Joseph Louis Barrow was best known as the "Brown Bomber." He boxed from 1934 until 1951 and reigned as heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949. Joe was born in Chambers County, Alabama--the seventh of eight children. Both of his parents were children of former slaves.

Louis' family moved to Detroit after a brush with the Ku Klux Klan when Joe was twelve. The Louis family was part of the Great Migration after World War I. His family settled on 2700 Catherine Street in the now defunct neighborhood of Black Bottom. When old enough, Joe and his older brother worked at the Rouge Plant for the Ford Motor Company.

During the Great Depression, Joe spent time at a local youth recreation center at 637 Brewster Street in Detroit and made his boxing debut early in 1932 at the age of seventeen. In 1933, Louis won the Detroit-area Golden Gloves Novice Division. In 1934, he won the Chicago Golden Gloves championship and later that year became the United States Amateur Champion in a national AAU tournament in St. Louis, Missouri. By the summer of 1934, Joe had gone pro with a management team.

In 1936, Louis got a title shot versus world heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in Yankee Stadium. The German trained hard while Louis seemed more interested in his golf game--his new hobby. Schmeling knocked Louis out in the 12th round handing Joe his first professional loss. Schmeling became a national hero in Nazi Germany as an example of Aryan superiority.

Max Schmeling and Joe Louis rematch.

No path to a rematch was open to Louis until June 22, 1938. Louis and Schmeling met for a second time at Yankee Stadium before a crowd of 70,043. The fight was broadcast worldwide in English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. It should be noted that Max Schmeling was not a Nazi, but the Nazi party propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels hyped the match proclaiming a Black man could not defeat Herr Schmeling.

The American press promoted the match as an epic battle between Nazi ideology and American democratic ideals. Louis became the embodiment of anti-Nazi sentiment. After the big media buildup, the fight lasted only two minutes and four seconds. Schmeling went down three times before his trainer threw in the towel ending the match. For the first time in American history, every Black person and White person in the country celebrated the same event at the same time. Not until the end of World War II would that happen again.

Joe Louis became the first African-American national hero. He reigned as heavyweight champion from 1937 until 1949--longer than anyone else. In 1951, Louis was beaten by Rocky Marciano and retired from the ring. The following year, he was responsible for breaking the color line integrating the game of golf. He appeared as a celebrity golfer under a sponsor's exemption at a PGA event in 1952. How many people know that?

Joe Louis and Max Schmeling

Joe Louis died on April 12, 1981 of cardiac arrest at the age of sixty-six in Desert Springs Hospital near Las Vegas after a public appearance at the Larry Holmes-Trevor Berbick heavyweight battle. President Ronald Reagan waived eligibility rules for Joe Louis to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors on April 21st. His funeral was paid for by his friend Max Schmeling, who also acted as a pallbearer.

In his professional boxing career, Joe Louis won virtually every boxing award there is and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously in 1982. The City of Detroit honored Joe Louis with a monument on October 16, 1989. The sculpture was sponsored by Sports Illustrated magazine and the Detroit Institute of Arts.

 

When drivers look left at Woodward Avenue from eastbound Jefferson Avenue (now a No Left Turn), they are confronted with a colossal fist and forearm suspended from a triangular superstructure--a testament to the regard and respect Detroiters hold for their hometown hero.

Link to the Joe Louis/Max Schmeling 1937 heavyweight fight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LNzWHuygpw

Detroit Time Capsule Anthology

After a decade writing 500 Fornology posts, I'm proud to announce the publication of my fifth book Detroit Time Capsule, which is a collection of seventy-five of my re-edited, best Detroit posts including significant historic moments, biographies of people who left their mark on the city, and memories of media personalities in the early days of Detroit television.

Detroit Time Capsule is a trip down memory lane, which should resonate with nostalgic Baby Boomers and contemporary Detroiters with a taste for learning their town's rich history and heritage.

This anthology makes a great holiday gift for readers who have an interest in easy to digest Detroit history. Most chapters are not tied by a narrative thread and can be read in three to five minutes.

And finally, I want to acknowledge Detroit/Ypsilanti photographer Chris Ahern for his striking photograph of the Monument to Joe Louis, aka The Fist (1986) by Robert Graham.

Detroit Time Capsule Amazon site

Detroit Pitchman Ollie Fretter

Ollie Fretter

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1923, Oliver "Ollie" Fretter moved with his parents to Royal Oak, Michigan when he was in his early teens. He graduated from Royal Oak Dondero High School in 1941. After serving in the military during World War II, Fretter borrowed $600 from an uncle to open an appliance repair shop.

By 1950, twenty-seven-year-old Ollie Fretter decided he may as well sell home appliances and consumer electronics. With the post-war G.I. Bill and Veterans' Administration funding boom, America moved from a nation of renters to a nation of home owners. Selling appliances and electronics was a forward-looking career move for Fretter. His first store opened on Telegraph Road, north of I-96 in Redford, Michigan. Within ten years, Fretter had eight Detroit area stores.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Fretter Appliance and Electronics ran print ads in all of Detroit's major newspapers. The ads ran on Mondays to advertise mid-week Wednesday sales and on Fridays to generate weekend sales. The ads featured photos of appliances with the "Lowest Prices in Town" listed beneath them. Fretter's headshot was prominently displayed near his slogan, "If I can't beat your best deal, I'll give you five pounds of coffee."

Typical Fretter Appliance Print Ad

An unidentified Fretter employee revealed to a Detroit Free Press reporter, "Fretter gave away about 200 pounds of canned coffee a month costing about $500. When coffee prices rose, Fretter ordered one-pound cans of coffee with the label Fretter's House printed on them listing the weight as five-pounds. Somehow, Fretter got away with it. The cans became gag items that most customers were good-natured about. My guess is these short-weight coffee cans would be valuable collectors' items today if any have survived.

In 1971, Ollie Fretter increased his advertising budget and shifted into television advertising. He starred in his own commercials projecting a hokey, amateurish charm 40 or 50 times a week over most small market TV stations. His ads ran in the afternoon and late nights when buying television time was cheaper than prime time.

At first, Ollie Fretter played it straight as an owner/pitchman, but to distract his potential customers from the mind-numbing repetition of his commercials, he began hamming it up with all sorts of silly promotions like dressing as various characters. Sometimes, he would appear as a Gypsy violist, a mountain man, George Washington on President's Day, Uncle Sam on the Fourth of July, Johnny Cash, or Mother Nature. He would do almost anything to sell a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a television, or a stereo system.

Ollie Fretter became Detroit's King of Local Advertising despite newspaper columnists ridiculing him in their editorials. He cried all the way to the bank. When Detroit Free Press reporter James Harper asked Fretter why he appeared in his own commercials, he replied, "People like to think they're dealing with the owner of a business. A too professional approach is not good. People like to think they're listening to somebody just like them."

In May of 1980, Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley brought a $25,000 lawsuit against Fretter Appliance and Electronics for violating the Item Pricing and Deceptive Adverstising Act. The company's media advertising and signs that hung in their chain stores proclaimed "The Lowest Prices in Town." Ollie Fretter and his lawyers failed to provide documented evidence to backup that long-held claim.

Fretter updated his company's advertising by making the products the focus. An off-screen announcer described the appliances and electronics featured that week. At the end, Fretter's image was superimposed over the products with him saying, "The competition knows me, you should too." The new approach reflected the loss of Fretter's consumer protection lawsuit and the increasing competition from Highland Appliance.

But there was also a new threat--the big box appliance stores popping up along the retail horizon. Advertising had gone from cute to cutthroat. By offering lost leaders (items retailers sold at a loss) big box stores like Best Buy, Circuit City, and Sam's Club undersold their competition. Fretter rolled the dice and took his company public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1986 to raise capital and expand into new markets to compete nationally.

Fretter's long-time competitor Highland Appliance filed for Chapter 11 bankrupcy in 1992. It owed its creditors $241 million dollars. Best Buy saw an opportunity and stepped in to fill the retail void by opening six big box stores in the Detroit area by the end of 1993.

Fretter bought up his biggest competitor Silo Electronics, but Silo hadn't posted a profit since the early 1980s. Fretter assumed Silo's debt and lack of liquid assets but expanded into more states anyway. The bottom dropped out of consumer electronics market due to stiff competition and falling stock values. Fretter spread his assets too thin and banks refused to lend him any more money. By 1995, all Silo Electronics stores closed, with all Fretter stores closing by the end of June 1996. Ollie retired after forty-six years in the retail business.

Fred Yaffe, president of the advertising agency that handled the Fretter account from1992 until 1995, noted, "It wasn't any one thing that killed Fretter's business. It was a bunch of things that all happened at once. He had serious competitors with deeper pockets, constant price wars in the appliance and electronics industries, and a lack of new products like VCRs and handheld video cameras."

Oliver "Ollie" Fretter lived out his life in Bloomfield Hills and died at Beaumont Hospice on June 29, 2014 at the age of ninty-one. He was survived by his wife of sixty-five years Elma M., his adult children Laura and Howard, and his grandchildren Alexandra, Andrew, and Catherine.

"Ollie's Ooop" Sale (1979) 

Docuartist DeVon Cunningham--a Detroit Art Treasure--has Left this Vale of Tears

DeVon Cunningham and his partner Rose Johnson

Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on February 21, 1935, DeVon Cunningham began his art training at the tender age of eleven when he won a scholarship to the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis, Indiana. Part of his training was a two-week, all expenses paid seminar to study in Italy.

He continued his art training at the Detroit Center for Creative Studies and the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. Cunningham went on to complete a bachelor's degree from the Detroit Institute of Technology and a master's degree from Wayne State University.

While he was working as a community outreach and public relations executive for Detroit Edison, DeVon was painting. Over his long career, DeVon's paintings have appeared in many galleries including eleven one-man shows, and his work hangs in many private and public art collections. His work is digitally archived and indexed in the catalog for the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institute.

In 1969, DeVon Cunningham achieved national recognition when he painted the mural of the Black Christ on the dome of St. Cecelia Catholic church at Livernois and Burlingame in Detroit. This work featured a twenty-four-foot, brown-skinned image of Jesus with six multiethnic angels beside him serving high mass. The church's parishioners were mostly African Americans from the neighborhood. The mural was a welcomed addition to this French Romanesque church built in 1930 before the ethnicity of the neighborhood changed.

A national controversy erupted when the mural appeared on the cover of Ebony magazine in March 1969. Twenty-five years later on December 25th, 1994, the mural once again became the topic of controversy when the New York Times featured the church mural on Christmas Day. Reverend Raymond Ellis, rector of St. Cecelia's, responded to the criticism in a Detroit Free Press interview.

"Black parishioners have a legitimate complaint when they walk into a church to worship and everything is white. Christianity forces people to accept Western European culture.

"The historical Christ was Hebrew, a Jew from the Middle East. He might have had dark skin; he might have been fair. But Christ is the head of the church, he is God, and he is any color people want him to be."

Cunningham's commissioned portraits of prominent Detroit community leaders include Martha Jean "The Queen" Steinberg, a WCHB radio personality active in Detroit's African American community; Coleman Young, the city's first black mayor; Abe Burnstein, Detroit's reputed Purple Gang boss during Prohibition; and many others.

The most mysterious portrait Cunningham has painted is of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. It was unveiled at Gordy's Boston-Edison mansion as a birthday present from his sister Anna Gordy Gaye--the wife of singer Marvin Gaye. Berry was quite moved and lauded the painting of him dressed up like Napoleon. Somewhere along the line, someone suggested that it might not be a compliment to be compared to Napoleon, and the painting disappeared. (More on that story appears in the link at the end of this post.)

Cunningham's portraits gave way to what he calls docuart that informs, instructs, and involves the viewer. His work combines symbolism with cultural iconography that leaves the viewer with a montage of images to ponder. DeVon's art not only appeals to the eye but also to the mind.

DeVon's jazz musician series typifies much of his later work. Historically, Detroit was instrumental in the 1920s through the 1950s for providing African American jazz and blues musicians venues to perform and make a living through their music. To document the historic relationship of Jews and African Americans, Cunningham painted legendary performers like Theolonius Monk, Louie Armstrong, Billie Holiday, and Miles Davis, who performed in Detroit's legendary nightclubs owned by Jewish impresarios who hired Black acts when other venue bookers would not.

Billie Holiday docuart

 

DeVon Cunningham has produced significant art that remains relevant in our changing times. The Spill the Honey foundation commissioned a series of paintings that emphasizes the shared legacy of Jewish people and African Americans seeking historical truth and social justice through educational and artistic programs. The theme of Cunningham's last body of work deals with the environment and the pollinators--both endangered.

Mr. Cunningham passed away at 1:00 am Monday morning, July 31st at the age of eighty-eight after complications from a prolonged illness. Only two weeks before, DeVon and Rose Johnson went to Cafe D'Mongo's in downtown Detroit for his last outing where he enjoyed meeting with some of his fans, my wife Sue and I among them.

Berry Gordy's Lost Portrait