Terror in the City of Champions (22 page)

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Davis said. The men drove off as Armour’s wife called for help. The shooting put Armour in the hospital for months. Police had no suspects and Armour could offer little in the way of a description. One was short and one was tall, he told police.

On another night Dean and Davis drove slowly through a downriver neighborhood with thirteen sticks of dynamite and a starter cap in their vehicle. Dean worried that the explosives could go off at any time. Davis wanted to bomb a black man’s home, but he insisted that it be occupied. They surveyed several residences, checked for cars, and peered into windows. They found one potential target, but couldn’t be sure that anyone was there. Davis told Dean, “Well, I don’t see no use wasting all this dynamite on this shack ’less the nigger’s inside.”

Poor blacks made safe targets. More often than not, they faced the wrath, not the assistance, of law enforcement. Police forces were almost entirely white and in the Detroit area notoriously brutal toward blacks. Complaints of violence abounded but drew minimal press coverage. The stories that appeared in the dailies usually justified and rationalized police aggression rather than condemned it.

In Highland Park in early April, police fired at an unarmed homeless man, Frank Massie, at one-thirty in the afternoon. Massie was naked and reportedly accosting schoolchildren when police arrived and chased him into an alley. They shot Massie in the back, claiming that he had earlier grabbed a child and begun to twist his neck.
Highland Parker
editor Art Kingsley doubted the police. Under the headline P
OLICE
O
FFICER’S
S
HOOTING OF
C
RAZED
N
EGRO
C
ALLS FOR
I
NVESTIGATION,
Kingsley questioned the need to gun down a fleeing, unarmed man. “Shooting a human being to death—black or white—is not a trivial matter,” he said. “It is not a thing to be lightly dismissed as merely ‘a regrettable occurrence.’ Likewise, when a policeman uses his revolver and especially with fatal effect, all the circumstances deserve to be thoroughly investigated, without delay.”

One May afternoon Davis and Dean were working at the Mistersky Power Station, a six-story coal-burning plant not far from the pre–Civil War Fort Wayne, when Davis asked him if he could “get hold of a colored guy.” Davis said he was planning a weekend party at the place near Rush Lake and wanted to provide his guests “a little excitement.” It didn’t matter which black man; any would do. They were just going to shoot him for amusement. Dean said that he didn’t know any candidates but that Charles Rouse might.

Rouse owed Silas Coleman eighteen dollars for carrying bricks. Rouse had hired him off the street so there was no paper trail. He was an ideal candidate, Rouse thought. Coleman, forty-two, had been working sporadically through the winter and spring. He had come into a bit of money recently, probably from illicit activity. (He had earlier served time for breaking and entering.) With the windfall Coleman had bought three new suits. He felt optimistic. His job prospects had brightened recently. A Great War veteran, Coleman possessed a letter from an American Legion post commander recommending him to Donald Marshall, one of the supervisors who hired blacks at Ford Motor Company. It was a form letter from a man who didn’t know him, but Coleman hoped it would work magic. He kept the letter in his jacket pocket.

Jesse Owens, already a collegiate track star, had sports fans speculating about how well he might do at the Big Ten Western Conference championship. Maybe a world record? Or two? Owens, a sophomore at Ohio State University, had been amazing track enthusiasts with his performances. Expectations were high. In March he had set the world indoor record in the sixty-yard dash, defeating defending champion Willis Ward of the University of Michigan. Owens was looking forward to the outdoor championships in Ann Arbor. But not everyone was. “A guy can’t get a word in edgewise what with the shine-boys, locker-room attendants, and janitors proudly relating the feats of strength and skill and speed performed by their ‘cullud’ brethren,” wrote Braven Dyer of the
Los Angeles Times
. “My favorite bootblack can rattle off more of Jesse Owens’s records than I can, and that’s supposed to be my business.”

Six days before the big event, Owens injured his back roughhousing with friends after a flag football game in Columbus. Throughout the week his coach, trainer, and teammates worked on him, applying heat and massaging his muscles, trying to get him ready for the big day. When Saturday, May 25, arrived—a pleasant sunny afternoon in Ann Arbor—Owens was unsure whether he would be able to compete.

Twelve thousand people came to Ferry Field, former home of the Wolverines football team. Among the horde of students was Gerald Ford, Michigan’s star center. He came not only to root for his college, but also for Willis Ward, one of his closest friends. Ward, like Owens and Joe Louis, was Alabama-born. He played football at Michigan, contributing to its national championships in 1932 and 1933, as well as its dismal 1–7 1934 season. Ward was also black, a fact that had prompted a visiting Georgia Tech team to vow not to play if Ward took the field. Ford and other teammates threatened to quit if Ward was not allowed to play, but Ward intervened and encouraged them to compete.

Minutes before the track championship, Owens told his coach he wanted to try his first event, the 100-yard dash. At three-fifteen he won the race, tying the world record at 9.4 seconds. Seven minutes later in the long jump, he topped Ward and others by leaping more than twenty-six feet and eight inches, another world record. By four o’clock, he had set two more records, in the 220-yard sprint and the 220-yard low hurdles. Even Michigan fans cheered wildly for Owens. Though injured, he delivered a performance for the ages. On sports pages through the country his feat overshadowed not only the local ball teams—the Tigers won their sixth in seven tries—but also Babe Ruth’s final three career home runs, delivered in one game.

Meanwhile the still-undefeated Joe Louis was in New York, training for his biggest match yet, a June Yankee Stadium bout against former champion Primo Carnera, whose punches had once killed a man. Louis and Owens, the brightest black athletes in the country, had yet to meet. But soon the twenty-one-year-olds would become friends. Between them it seemed as if black Americans were making significant strides. But hours after Owens’s glory, just miles up the road, came a sickening reminder of the depth and persistence of racial hatred.

Charles Rouse told Silas Coleman that he was going to Pinckney to get money owed him by a contractor. Coleman would get his eighteen dollars if he came along. He agreed. Rouse and Dean picked him up at nine-thirty that night at Grand River and Schoolcraft Roads. Coleman was not physically daunting. Just over five feet tall, he walked with a limp. He was wearing a white linen cap and looking forward to partying with his landlady in the evening. He had bought a couple cases of beer for the occasion. Coleman and his wife, Eulah, hadn’t lived together in several years, but they remained married and in contact. They had a young son named Donald.

The drive to Pinckney took more than an hour. The village, situated in a region marked with lakes, offered a quick getaway for folks looking to fish or swim. The weekend tourism trade fueled part of its economy, which hadn’t heard much good news since Henry Ford purchased the old mill pond in the 1920s. As part of his Village Industries program, he had talked of building a small factory there. But it had never happened.

Pinckney was three and a half miles northeast of Hell, a community known mostly for its name. On the other side of Pinckney was Rush Lake, where legionnaires Harvey Davis, James Roy Lorance, John Bannerman, and Ervin Lee were drinking beer and whiskey with their wives at a table behind the cottage. It was nearing eleven o’clock and the kids were in bed when Dean and Rouse pulled up with Silas Coleman in the backseat.

Dean went around back and after greeting the clan asked to speak with Davis inside the house. He told him they had lured Coleman there in search of a contractor. Davis said to tell Coleman the contractor was fishing on the old mill pond and that they would all drive out there to find the man. When they went back outside to the drinking table, Davis announced, “Get your guns, you fellows, we’re going to have some fun. . . . We got a Negro that beat a white boy. . . . We’re going to take him for a one-way ride.”

Davis rode in the lead car. They headed past St. Mary’s Cemetery along Mower Road, beneath the tall trees that lined both sides and created a leafy tunnel. Davis directed his crew to Nash Bridge, a low, primitive, wood-plank structure that allowed unpaved Cedar Lake Road to cross Honey Creek. They stopped on the bridge, a familiar spot to locals. A year earlier, a man’s twisted body had turned up nearby; Steve Lazlo’s skull had been crushed by a vehicle (driven over him, it would turn out, by an angry stepson). Decades before, twenty-four-year-old Carrie Gardner, a teacher, had jumped from the bridge and drowned herself after her father forbid her from seeing her boyfriend.

A half-moon hung in the sky, highlighting the shadowy terrain, glimmering on open water. The pond, three hundred yards wide, stretched over a mile. It was dark and ominous and thick with cattails, brush, and lily pads. Some nights, fishermen would be on the water around midnight, trying to land catfish in the reeds. Lucius Doyle did a good business renting boats to them. Gawky Harvey Davis had been a regular customer for four years, arriving at eleven o’clock or so with his friends, even when it rained. Doyle would usually be in bed when they returned.

Silas Coleman was out of the car. He edged toward the water, scanning the horizon for the nonexistent contractor. The nighttime sounds of nature—croaking frogs, chirping crickets—scored the scene.

“Don’t see any boat fishing out there,” Coleman said.

Davis pulled his .38 first and walked toward Coleman. All but Lorance followed. Coleman looked shocked but got out no words before Davis shot him in the stomach. He tried to speak, then turned and ran—“like a deer,” one said.

“Don’t let that nigger get away,” Davis yelled.

Coleman managed to run two hundred feet with legionnaires chasing and firing at him. Dayton Dean didn’t get off a shot. His .45 jammed with his homemade lead-jacket bullets. Coleman leapt into the swamp and the barrage continued. Teenager Joan Spears, returning from a late movie, heard the shots. So did fisherman Harold Hinchey.

When Coleman collapsed into the water, Davis, Dean, and their cohorts headed back to the cottage where they had beers and shots of whiskey. Davis warned the men to keep their mouths shut “or it will be too bad for you.” Davis told them that Coleman had likely fallen into the pond’s sinkhole, which he approximated at twenty by thirty feet and two hundred feet deep. The hole, he said, held many bodies.

The next morning, a man discovered Coleman dead near the bridge, leaning against a post six feet from shore. He had been shot multiple times—in the head, chest, and neck. Local blacks were asked to identify him, but no one knew him. Police theorized Coleman had been killed by other blacks. They showed little interest in investigating. On Monday Dayton Dean spotted a small news story about Coleman’s death. The
Detroit Free Press
described the shooting in three sentences, noting that “the bullet-riddled body of a Negro about forty was found lying on the edge of a pond”—and that police had no leads. The death was bigger news in the village of Pinckney, where the editor of the
Dispatch
complained, “The crime of murder is no novelty in Detroit and it is hard to get the officers there greatly interested, especially when the victim is a friendless Negro with a police record.”