Young Scholar: Eastern Michiga University 01

EMU had two good things going for it. First, many of the faculty were hard-working and knew their stuff. Second, most of the grad students in the Geography-Geology Department were intellectually engaged and excited about learning. Both elements were right up my alley and gave me considerable satisfaction.

The part about teaching there that was most frustrating was the course load. We had to teach four courses each semester. Which often translated into having four separate preparations. It was maddening. And in truth many of the undergrads were less than interested in learning anything. They wanted a degree so they could get a job. Therefore, their commitment to learning was barely skin deep. Students like that filled my classes and made me want to pull my hair out.

Shortly before finishing the dissertation I got involved with grad and undergrad students on a summer semester field geography project in Detroit. You have to remember it was 1972, a time of turmoil in the U.S. over Vietnam and many other related and not so related social causes. A time of civil rights protests and riots. A time when the sweet smell of marijuana seemed to be everywhere outdoors and LSD and cocaine were sweeping the campuses. Kids in southeastern Michigan were discovering some wild guy named Bob Seeger and his Silver Bullet Band. Well, not me because I wasn’t into rock music. But you get the picture.

I decided one painless way to get students involved in gritty urban social issues was by offering an eight-week Field Course in Urban Geography in central Detroit. The field course focused on the Cass Corridor or in what was termed by the City of Detroit’s Planning Department the Cass-Trumbull Neighborhood, to be specific. About twenty students enrolled in the course. Among the grad students were Larry Hugg, Dick Crocker, Dick Berg, Jim Anderson Jr. (Big Jim’s son who had come to EMU for a master’s degree probably because his father knew I’d look out for him, though he never needed it) and Bob Ayotte, a bright undergrad.

Working with the Detroit Geographical Expedition, a leftist community-based organization founded by the famous radical geographer Bill Bunge, I hooked up with a fairly well known community organization, the Trumbull Community Center, and we worked out a deal where we would gather information under their direction and for their use against the City, which was trying its damnedest to bulldoze and “urban renewal” much of the area. (Author’s Note: Bill Bunge was one of the principal heirs to the Bunge grain fortune. Either slightly before or right around that time he repudiated his father’s family and their large fortune, became estranged from them, and eventually wound up a card-carrying Communist living in Toronto who, for a time, supported himself and his family by driving a cab. He was also one of the most creative and intellectually stimulating geographers of the 1960s and early 1970s. The idea of “geographical expeditions" to the uncharted territory of U.S. inner cities was his and his alone. In 1962, Bunge wrote one of the most advanced texts on theoretical geography and was the darling of geographers who used statistical techniques in their research. There’s a LOT more to that story but this blog probably isn’t the place to tell it other than to say that Bunge told me personally that he thought I had stolen the job at EMU from him and he resented the shit out of me and called me an imperialist, back-stabbing mother fucker. In those precise words. No exaggeration.)

After a week of classroom prep we packed up in early June and headed to Detroit, where we lived 24/7 in the community with volunteers or at a commune run by Sam Stark and Kae Halonen, leaders of the Trumbull Community Center. San endured that summer by taking Dave and Karen to St. Louis. Larry, Bob, and I lived at the commune with about six resident members. So, when I returned to Ann Arbor for our Sunday off it was to an empty apartment and a toilet still stopped up by a gift deposited by Dick Berg. Ha ha. I bet he thought I would have forgotten that huge log by this time. No chance.

We were interested in competition and conflict over land use among vastly unequal adversaries. On one side of that struggle were the poor residents of the Cass Corridor, largely but not entirely populated by blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Appalachian whites defined by the “establishment” as marginal at best and the NGOs and institutions that supported them. How can I fail to mention that the area was characterized by low incomes, low educational achievement, deteriorated and dilapidated housing, and few city services.

On the other side were arrayed the forces of money and power: the City of Detroit in the guise of the Planning and Housing Commissions, Wayne State University, the Detroit Medical Center, and the corporations operating the New Center (you better be thinking General Motors). In a nutshell, all of those powerful adversaries were working hard to encroach on and convert to their control land in the Cass Corridor and the adjacent Woodward Corridor and give the then existing residents the boot. It was classic urban renewal, otherwise known in the urban planning business as Nigger Removal.

In practical terms, each student was assigned to a team headed by a member of the Cass-Trumbull Community and gathered information for a specific research topic. Which meant that each research unit consisted of four or five students, with a minimum of one grad student per team, a local expert, and with me as an ex-officio, “floating,” member. As an aside, I was fiercely determined not get caught in another argument over academic imperialism (not since my experience in Kinloch or with a very threatening and intimidating Bill Bunge) and worked with the community-based NGOs to avoid any such appearance.

We did the ordinary things academics do but residents were not trained to do, mostly identify, collect, and analyze publically available data, turn the results over to the community organizations, and work with them to apply the information systematically to their struggle to retain control of the land. What we were fighting was the wholesale clearance and redevelopment of functioning inner-city neighborhoods. Naturally, the “progress” that the City was interested in and the neighborhood was fighting was intended to benefit someone else. Meaning the power elite. The poor residents were supposed to fold their tents, pack their meager belongings, and slink away with their tails tucked between their legs, preferably under cover of darkness. But go away nonetheless.

What we did that summer was advocacy urban geography and planning as we advocated for the residents of Cass-Trumbull against the City. I believe that summer taught all the students a great deal about how cities really work. It taught me as well. Afterwards, I worked with Larry Hugg, Dick Crocker, and Bob Ayotte to write a paper that was published in 1974 in Antopode: a Radical Journal of Geography titled: “Competition and Conflict over Land Use Change in the Inner-City: Institution versus Community.” Larry wound up doing his Master’s thesis on a geographical analysis of life and health in Detroit and Dick’s was on how Wayne State had been abusing the residents of the Cass-Trumbull Community for decades. So, I think the intellectual investment in that one summer field course was well worth it.

Later, Larry and I edited a book on the urban geography of black America that was published by Doubleday Press. We wanted the cover to be a photo of Moms Mabley pointing to a globe with that goofy expression on her face but it didn’t fly with Doubleday. They were too tight-assed. Well, maybe Moms, a well-known standup black comedian and vaudevillian from the Chitlin Circuit, would have been a stretch for our audience of middle-class geographers. Ha ha.

As an aside, several years later when I was attending a conference of geographers in nearby Windsor, Ontario, my old friend Gerry Romsa from grad school days at the University of Florida and then a geography professor at the University of Windsor warned me to stay as far away as possible from his colleague, Professor Jack R., because if I didn’t he would kick my ass. When, in astonishment, I asked him why he told me that Jack’s daughter had been living at the Cass commune with Kae Halonen and Sam Stark and because she had spoken of me to her father in glowing terms he had assumed I had been fucking her brains out on a regular basis, it being a hippy commune and all and us living and cavorting there together, so to speak.

Jesus, I had hardly spoken to the girl that summer. Seriously. Much less did the deed with her. The longest contact I had had with her was chatting in the commune kitchen one Saturday afternoon when I was making marijuana-laced brownies for the residents. (Author’s Note: They supplied the goodies; I supplied the brownie mix and chocolate chips I had “liberated” from a local supermarket.) Nevertheless, I stayed away from the angry father and his righteous middle-class values. It was the early 1970s and young people were fucking anyone who looked the slightest bit interested. I missed out, no doubt.