I was there . . .
Jim Parker
Detroit, 1986
Jim Parker reads his narrative.
Ah Detroit. I loved going places where I have a history.
Detroit Tigers baseball was a first for me as a little kid from deep in the
piney woods of East Texas in the ‘50s.
And here we were in Motor City to do “battle” with Jack Gilstrap and the
American Public Transit Association, which for our ADAPT folks was the “evil
empire”!
But, Detroit was also a city with a history of struggle – unions and civil
rights! And, it was the city of Coleman Young, Mayor and civil rights icon. And
of that most beloved lady of the first bus fight in Montgomery, Alabama, Mrs.
Rosa Parks.
I was psyched to know that Mayor Young and Mrs. Parks were in Detroit and that
Mrs. Parks had indicated she would march with us for accessible public transit.
Wow, was I wrong!
Not only did Mayor Young treat us like a second-class stepchild with his
authoritarian approach to protecting APTA conventioneers, he tried to shut down
the transit system where it couldn’t be shown for what it was – a public
financed piece of crap! There were more “jack-booted” type of cops for a
hundred-plus ADAPT freedom fighters than I could have imagined, armed and ready
for the “crips”.
One situation I remember particularly well was in front of APTA’s towering
convention building, replete with the typical steel-barrier walls separating the
abused from the abusers, with a line of Detroit’s finest - big, powerfully-built
with silvered-sun glasses - between us and them. One, in particular, must have
been 6’4” and 200-plus pounds of physical perfection. I tried to talk, but he
was stone silent; then, about 10 minutes later I finally said, “Well, man I
guess you think we’re not human.”, and he almost fell down. I’m sure as a black
man he had heard that before. He said, “That ain’t it; they told us to keep
quiet and keep our distance.”
As we always found out in our battles with APTA, the cops were usually on our
side as all too often they had friends and/or family with disabilities.
My biggest disappointment was when CBS’s Ed Bradley “drank the Kool-Aid” and
lined up with the oppressors, and probably had a direct hand, along with Mayor
Young, in keeping Mrs. Parks from marching with us. It stunned me to see first
hand Bradley speaking at the APTA convention and putting us down; I wondered how
he put that shoe on his other foot? And Mayor Young trying the Southern tactics
on ADAPT, without the dogs and water cannons, with “his” police force. Made me
wonder if the “white” Youngs and Bradleys in the racist community awoke with a
smile.
And, I clearly remember preparing to bring Marcos, one of my close friends from
El Paso, to Detroit by spending over an hour with his mother talking about “la
lucha para los derechos” – the fight for rights in my “best” border Spanish.
And, the ‘not-to-be-forgotten’ incident when the cops wouldn’t allow me to use
the restroom and I was forced to go to a hideaway, using Frank and Frazier as
‘lookouts’. However, the rookie female cop didn’t see it that way and provided
me with a “day at the gym” with about 15 other cops, with whom I had a good
laugh and cheap seats for watching the World Series. Mike later said that the
issue was just too embarrassing for the Chief of Police to charge me.
All things considered, it was another devastating realization of just how
stacked the system is against the abused and how the powerful have bought their
way into the system to keep the “costs” down. As per normal, ADAPT never, never
gives up! And not only “We Will Ride”, but “We Do Ride!” despite the best paid
efforts of government and APTA!