Detroit's Griot of Griswold Street--Larry Mongo--on The Blue Vein Society

In a hidden pocket--a couple of blocks up and over from Grand Circus Park in downtown Detroit--Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy is tucked within a very short block. Owner Larry Mongo bought the business in June of 1987 from the Greek Seros family. Their specialty was chili con carne. At one time, the building was an old-fashioned soda pop shop.

 

Larry's son Jerome turned the building into an afterhours club called the Wax Fruit Rhythm Cafe where Detroit rappers performed until it closed in 1993. Larry and his wife renamed the business Cafe D'Mongo's. The "D" represents his wife Dianne.

 

There is a low counter top and stationary stools bolted to the floor and four booths across from them. Behind the booths is a wall separating an area with upholstered chairs and a few small tables facing a grand piano where the Speakeasy's house band Carl and Company--led by Carl, the Human Jukebox--performs after 8:00 PM on Friday and Saturday nights. The bar is open from 5:00 PM until closing.

There is no better way to describe D'Mongo's Speakeasy than an authentic Detroit dive. The interior decoration looks like a museum of Detroit memorabilia. Its walls are loaded with photos that harken to Detroit's past, mixed with vintage photos of the Mongo family from the 1920s onward. Adorning several spots on the walls are original portraits of American jazz artists painted by longtime docuartist DeVon Cunningham. Many celebrities have made the pilgrimage to D'Mongo's--movie director Quentin Tarantino for one and actor Ryan Gosling for another.

Larry Mongo and Quentin Tarantino

Larry invited my Terror In Ypsilanti researcher Ryan M. Place and me to attend a taping at Cafe D'Mongo's Speakeasy for a program called Ten Best Bars In America for Esquire magazine. The joint was packed with the new face of Detroit--a mixture of young, upwardly mobile Detroiters. 

***

The Mongo family has had a long and fabled history in Detroit since the first four Mongo men left South Carolina in 1906 to avoid the long arm of the law. One of them was wanted to murder. During prohibition, the Mongo family worked with Detroit's Purple Gang, so they could safely operate a chain of fish markets in the Detroit area which the gang used to launder their bootlegging, extortion, and gambling profits. This relationship gave that generation of Mongos a certain level of power and respect on the street.

In more recent Detroit history, Larry and his younger brother Adolph have been political advisers to Black mayors from Coleman Young--Detroit's first Black mayor--to Kwame Kilpatrick. When things went terribly wrong in the Kilpatrick administration, the Mongo's wisely took a step backwards to disassociate themselves from the bad publicity.

One afternoon, I was able to meet and talk with Larry Mongo about the issue of race which has dominated Detroit politics for the last fifty years. Being an Ofay--derisive Black term for a White person--I was not aware of something which contemporary social scientists have labeled pigmentocracy. Within the American Black population at the turn of the twentieth-century until the mid-1960s, wealth and status of African Americans were tied to the shade of skin color--the lighter, the better.

"There was an interracial caste system in the Black community where dark skinned blacks were looked down upon by lighter skinned blacks as being genetically inferior," Larry Mongo explained. "There was something called The Blue Vein Society where a person had to show his or her forearm to look for a dark blue vein to determine if the person was mixed race or not.

"Inner racism was worse at times than outer racism. We classified ourselves by shade of color or how much African blood you had. You might be described as an octoroon--a person of one-eighth African blood--or a mulatto--bi-racial--or somewhere in between."

President Johnson and Martin Luther King at signing of the 1964 Civil Rights bill.

I asked Larry Mongo about the impact of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on Detroit's Black community. "After the Civil Rights Act--passed by Lyndon Johnson's administration--everything changed in the Black community and neighborhoods," Larry explained.

"Don't get me wrong, things were never perfect back then, but everyone knew their place and the color lines were clearly drawn. Cross them and you did so at your own risk. That was in the heyday of the Jim Crow--separate but equal--laws.

"All manner of Black businesses catered to Black neighborhoods and things usually went okay. Everyone was getting by. When the Jim Crow laws were repealed and the Civil Rights Act was passed into law, more affluent Blacks could spent their money in White establishments like hotels and restaurants which had been off limits before.

Patterns of segregation--previously enforced by red-lining and real estate covenants--became illegal and drew successful middle-class Blacks out of the ghettos into outlying areas. This migration drew valuable resources away from the Black neighborhoods.

"Many Black businesses were mom-and-pop operations in neighborhoods that could no longer support them. These
neighborhoods went into further decline struggling to survive. Then in the sweltering heat of July 23rd, 1967--all hell broke loose on 12th Street--Detroit started to burn. 

"When (Antoine) Cadillac came here in 1701, it took 250 years to build up Detroit. This city has rotted from the inside out. Detroit needs a new economy--then business growth will begin to feed everything else. The city will survive only by creating wealth and decent jobs to help our residents pull themselves out of poverty and despair. More of our young people need to go to school rather than jail. They need to go to the library instead of the street corner. Now that will be a real revolution."

***

After my visit with Larry Mongo, I decided to Google the Blue Vein Society to learn more about it. From there, my research led me to several other culturally historic facts about the Black community in the first half of the twentieth-century.

The phrase Blue Vein Society originated at the end of the nineteenth-century, according to American author Charles W. Chesnutt in 1898. "This is a group which limited its membership to blue veins--light-skinned Black people White enough to show blue veins on their forearms.

"At the turn of the century, there were many American cities with Blue Vein Societies representing the miniscule Black upper and upper-middle classes. The Negro Blue Vein Society mimicked the white patrician Blue Blood Societies. Their primary purpose was to sponsor balls and galas as meeting places for eligible blue veined youth."

The Creoles in Louisiana formed almost a separate class of black American because they tended to be better educated with lighter skin--the children of more generations of co-mingling with European Whites--especially the French and Spanish.

Another phenomenon of Black cultural pigmentocracy--a carry over from the nineteenth century--was the paper bag test which originated in New Orleans. A brown paper bag would be attached to the entrance of a party or event, and anyone darker than the paper bag was denied admittance. This test was said to have been used in many churches, fraternities, and nightclubs.

Michael Eric Dyson

American author Michael Eric Dyson wrote, "The brown paper bag test is a metaphor for how the Black cultural elite literally established a caste system along color lines within the black community. This is one of the ways Blacks with European ancestry attempted to isolate and distinguish themselves from those who are mostly African."

My research also revealed some other labels still used within the black community. A redbone describes light coppery or caramel-colored skin with red overtones in the hair, sometimes with freckles and sometimes not. A yellowbone--also called high yellow--is slang for light-skinned Black females who could often pass as a White person.

 

Remember, this was the world before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In an attempt to secure a better life in segregated America, many light-skinned, mixed-race Blacks crossed the color line as reborn descendants of European ancestry and never looked back.

The history of mankind is rife with examples of one group who perceives itself as superior foisting itself upon another group who is perceived as inferior. This oppression takes many forms but always ends up the same way with someone being discriminated against.

Zug Island: A Detroit Riot Novel by Gregory A. Fournier - Book Review by Dr. Robert Rose

Tuesday, 13 August 2013

When Greg sent me his book, I assumed it was going to be about racism and the causes of the Detroit Riot in 1967. During that time I was teaching in an all black school of 800 in San Bernardino, California, and I knew full well how the tentacles of racism were choking the life from my students.

I was somewhat correct that it was about racism, but seen through the eyes of an eighteen year old white boy (Jake) who had never even been close to a black person. It is much more than that, it is a wonderful story about two young men, one white and one black who transcend their backgrounds and group prejudice to see one another as - human beings. The ending brought tears of joy and pride in what could be accomplished when we can erase what we’ve been taught and see one another freshly and fairly as uniquely human.


The long section that describes his time on Zug Island was interesting and terrifying. It reminded me of when I read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. My uncle had told me when he had worked in a meat packing plant in the Thirties he had been standing on a large piece of meat. When his shift was over he threw it into the garbage. 

The foreman saw him and ordered him to put it on the conveyor line to process. My uncle refused and was fired. That was minor compared to the horrors the children and poor immigrants endured in losing limbs and lives without insurance or medical treatment in the factories.

Zug Island was a living Hell. The furnaces were insatiable and the heat was unbearable, the smoke and dust were destroying their lungs, and the physical work only a man desperate for a job would take. 99% of the laborers were poor blacks, mostly from the deep South. Jake stood out as one of the few whites. It was the fact that his grandfather and father had worked there and were respected that he was given the chance to prove himself. That he did.

Theo, a young married black who worked to make enough to hopefully get out of there and move his family back home, became Jake’s mentor and friend. Through Theo and the others, Jake saw a side of America he had no idea existed. The overwhelming frustrations from lack of a decent education, the fact that last hired, first fired was a reality that black men dealt with by taking it out on each other. Attacking any of the causes or any white person meant facing a justice system that they knew was unjust for them.

It didn’t make sense to most people why during the 1967 Detroit Riots, and other such outbreaks, that blacks destroyed their own neighborhoods. It was a build-up of intense anger from the reality of their helplessness against so many societal institutions that were keeping them down.


As teachers, Greg and I taught minority students and found ways to overcome their helplessness by building trust and caring relationships. Changing their negative mindsets through activities proved to them that they could be academically and socially successful and responsible for their actions.


Unfortunately, despite all the money poured into the minority schools and the pathetic attempts at real integration, and the fact that many lives did improve, the sense of inferiority and helplessness is the reality for millions today.


Greg’s book with his emphasis on the possibilities of real friendship between different races is proof that it can happen. It is a feel good book that you won’t want to put down until the end.

http://zugislandthenovel.com

The Ideology of Whiteness and the Trayvon Martin Debacle

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida, the issue of race in America has once again hit the front burner of our national consciousness. The rhetoric of race has rippled through communities across the United States, this time fueled and aggravated by partisan television commentators and their army of devoted listeners who have taken their message to the internet. Race baiting for political gain may once again put our nation at risk of civil unrest and embarrass us internationally.

Different accounts of what happened surface daily in the press. If Florida doesn't adequately investigate this ambiguous incident, the Federal  Office of Civil Rights surely will. I remember the race riots of the Sixties and the Chicago Democratic Convention. Believe me, our country does not want to see a repeat of those times. It was a zero sum game for everyone, and some cities never recovered from it.

Racial discrimination against people of African descent has been a feature of the cultural and political landscape in America for over three hundred years, but its roots run deep in European history when white supremacy was taken for granted and Europe sought to master and control people of color to amass great wealth and political control. The Triple Passage of the Eighteenth Century made England rich and powerful, and planted the scourge of white supremacy in the New World with its legacy of racism.

The ideology of whiteness in America was further advanced by the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s. As jobs became scarce during the Depression, black men were discriminated against in hiring and could only get the dirtiest and lowest paid factory or foundry jobs. This priced most blacks out of the housing market and forced them into overcrowded inner city slums with substandard housing.

The problem of employment for black women was not as pronounced because of the large number of underpaid domestic service jobs available. Often, black women could get jobs when many of the men couldn't, which further destabilized the African-American community. The uniform of a maid only reinforced the imagery of subservience for black women and supremacy for the white women who hired them.

As industry burgeoned in the Twentieth Century and the labor movement took off in America, many of the old rivalries of the immigrant Europeans who worked in the factories had softened by the second or third generation. Now, these "white" workers organized and conspired against blacks from the South, who were arriving in the northern industrial centers in growing numbers looking for work and the promise of a better life.

The article linked below attempts to answer the difficult question: What is white culture anyway? It isn't as easy to define as you might think.

http://www.thegrio.com/specials/trayvon-martin/transforming-white-culture-in-the-wake-of-trayvon-martin-shooting.php

Grandma Was Just That Way

Sometime in the late1920's, my grandmother and grandfather moved North from Tennessee looking for work. My grandfather found work at GM. He died before I was born. When I was a youngster in Detroit, I remember my grandmother working at Crowley's Department Store decorating cakes for a living. After she had a stroke on a downtown street after work one day, she was left paralyzed on her right side, so she moved to Arkansas and was attended to by a black woman who was every bit as old as she was.

My brother and I spent several summers on "vacations" with our parents visiting my grandmother in Elaine, Arkansas, in the early sixties. The film, The Help, reminded me of seeing the colored cafes and white-only drinking fountains in the small town.The one movie theater in Elaine had a separate entrance for blacks which led to the balcony. The white kids went through the front door and sat on the ground floor. These things do not exist anymore, but it wasn't that long ago when they did. I can bear witness to it.

Back to my grandmother: she lived in a rickety, clapboard house with wall paper, peeling from the humidity off the nearby Mississippi River. The house was across the street from the area's cotton gin and storage silos, where Uncle Ivo worked as the manager of the operation by day. Throughout the daylight hours, Miss Elizabeth, a black woman in her sixties, waited on my grandmother's beck and call. She was my grandmother's constant companion and attendant, until Uncle Ivo got home from the cotton gin later in the day.

"Just ask Miss Elizabeth for anything you want," my grandmother would say. "She'll make you a sandwich or a milk shake. Whatever you're partial to."

Miss Elizabeth didn't say much, but she smiled a lot. Between taking care of my grandma's personal hygiene needs, and feeding four extra people in the household, she sat quietly off to the side, or in the kitchen, gently rocking while cross stitching samplers or mending old clothes.

Having us there wasn't a bother for her. My mother cooked us dinners while we were there, and Miss Elizabeth could go home early on most days when we were there. She would grab her bag of stuff and trek almost a mile down the road to another house that looked more like a shack, with a houseful of family sitting around, and she was glad to be home. Her only day off was Sunday, which she spent at church with her family and friends.

"I don't know what I'd do without Miss Elizabeth," I remember Grandma saying. "I can't go to church anymore, so she reads the good book to me, and it soothes me."

Reading the Bible was the least of the services Miss Elizabeth performed for her in the course of a long day.

My mother couldn't help but ask. "How much do you pay her?"

"Forty dollars cash a month, under the table, and she's glad to get it."

"That's very reasonable considering everything she does for you, Mother."

"It's a good thing I'm a God fearing Christian woman. Who else would hire an old nigger woman like that?"

What ingratitude! I thought. Even as a kid, I was struck by her matter-of-fact, racist attitude.

But by the standards of her community, in her day, she believed she was being charitable. Sad but true. Well, those days are mostly over, thank goodness.

Not since the novel and the film, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, has this ugly reality been depicted with such humanity and humility than in The Help. I urge everyone to see this film while it's still in theaters. It has Oscar written all over it.