50 years ago, my father, a Detroit cop, was hosting a party on his day off. Then he got called in to work
In 1984, when I was starting my journalism career, I met writer, teacher and political activist Amiri Baraka in a bookstore on Chicago’s south side. He was signing his 500-page autobiography. “How, ” I asked the man who was at the center of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, “did you remember all this? Did you take notes?” He gave me a wry look and said, “you remember what’s important.” You do. I know that now as I remember back 50 years ago to Sunday, July 23,1967. I remember my father threw a family barbeque that came to an abrupt end because he was ordered to report to work. He was a Detroit police officer. Sunday, July 23 was the first day of Detroit’s 1967 riot. My father was Andrew John Humphries. In 1967 he was a sergeant with the Detroit Police Department. The day the riot started he was scheduled to be off-duty. Perhaps it was not the best time for a party. Mama and their thirteenth child — a baby girl — were just home from the hospital, and his mother-in-law was mad at him for giving her daughter another child. He had to do something besides accept cigars. So he invited my mother’s family to join us for a backyard barbeque. It was such an event, my father’s party. But who knew at the time it would be momentous? It was a hot day. It had been a scorching weekend. It would be a fiery week. And the riot’s first day blistered me with an understanding I did not have before: My father risked his life for a living. What I knew is that he was respected on our street. He looked imposing in his uniform, and I felt proud to be in public with my father, the police officer. I felt this especially in summer when he took his children to work with him to patrol the Detroit Zoo, Tiger baseball games, the State Fair, Fourth of July fireworks and Belle Isle park. And on Sunday, July 23,1967, he was throwing his first family party. We kids played Rock School, Hopscotch, Hide and Seek and marbles. The adults drank beer while talking at the fence. They lined the kids up for a photo: 19 of us. I am the tall, grinning 14-year-old, skin bronzed by sun. My sister Paula is the big kid in one photo that also shows our father in the background bending over a grill made of an old washtub set up off the ground on bricks, oven racks laid over the opening. At his foot is a pile of newspaper to start the fire. My grandmother sounded the first alarm when she called to say there was a riot. WJR or WWJ radio reported that in the early Sunday morning hours, Detroit police had raided an after-hours drinking establishment. Then a crowd gathered. Someone threw a brick. Somebody fired a gun. A few minutes after my grandmother hung up, the phone rang again. I answered to hear a deep voice asking for Sergeant Humphries. I ran out to get my father, and he hustled to the phone. When he hung up, the alarm turned into a full-on drill. As our relatives rushed home to safety, my father got ready to go to work. * My father never wanted to be a cop. He was artistic; he could draw, play piano and sing. He spoke German and invented games. Police officer was a good job he could get, though, because he was connected. His father-in-law, my grandfather, was a Detroit police officer, one of the first African Americans sworn as a Detroit police officer. That was in 1929. My father’s best friend Bruce had urged my father to apply to Ford Motor Company where Bruce was a tool and die maker. “It’s good money, Hump, ” Bruce said. My father said he shied away from the auto industry because of periodic lay-offs, but I think the real reason was sorrow. His father had contracted pneumonia while working in Ford’s steel foundry, and died when my father was 12 years old. * On Sunday, July 23, after his command officer called, my father prepared to leave us. He poured a jug of water over the fire in the washtub grill, and crouched to stare into the embers. I know what he was searching for, but I wonder, what did he see? Did he see himself 20 years earlier, the young police recruit in 1947, one of only five African Americans in his police academy class. That was the largest number of African Americans ever in one class, the newspaper reported. And they made much of it. We still have photographs of my father published in the papers. One photo showed my father holding the legs of a white recruit in the air in a wheelbarrow race. Another pictured the five new black cops being sworn in as boxer Joe Louis looked on. Another time, my father was snapped handling his police pistol. African Americans were hired as police officers when black leaders demanded them to serve swelling black communities. Staring down into the drowned washtub grill fire, did my father wonder why the city exploded that day, of all days? Did he wonder how this day was like the contents of the metal tub: bright one moment, and dark and ruined the next? I did. My father shook his head to snap out of his revelry, and stood up to his height of six feet. He gave me the pitcher to return to the kitchen, but I followed as he headed for the side of our house, where a birdbath sat under a spindly apricot tree. He called to my 13-year-old brother, Andy, his second-oldest son.
