Black Action Movement protesters on the University of Michigan campus in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Except that if you could somehow step back in time exactly four decades you would be greeted by a very different sight: students shouting, marching, and picketing; classes disrupted, canceled, or being held in nearby churches; angry voices calling for the deployment of the National Guard; a campus and community pushed almost to the breaking point. If the events of the Black Action Movement strike of 40 years ago had unfolded only a little differently, today people might speak of “Michigan” rather than “Kent State” as marking the tragic and deadly end of the sixties.

Instead, the BAM strike became one of the few protests of that era in which the students could make a valid claim of victory.

As it turned out, each side would have reason to believe that it had bested the other. The students because the university had been forced to negotiate and had ultimately acceded to the most important of their demands; the university administration because they claimed to be merely going forward with the plan they had proposed at the outset, rather than succumbing to student pressure.

That the protest came to a peaceful conclusion was due most probably to the restraint exhibited by university president Robben Fleming, and perhaps moreover Gov. William Milliken, who unlike other state leaders of that time (primarily Ronald Reagan in California) was not inclined to ruthlessly crush student rebellions; as well as the BAM leadership, who despite their often inflammatory rhetoric were determined to keep the strike non-violent.

The programs instituted as a result of the BAM strike of 1970 represented the first major breakthrough in a decades-long struggle to end discrimination at the University of Michigan. Up until the 1960s there were few black students or faculty at the university. In 1962 a federal investigation concluded that there was considerable racial bias in hiring at UM and urged that steps be taken to increase integration at every level. A committee set up by President Harlan Hatcher recommended that a special program be established to provide additional recruiting of minority students as well as financial aid and support services. The Opportunity Awards Program was started in 1964 and by 1969 black enrollment had increased from 2% to a little over 3%.

To many, however, this modest increase hardly seemed to make a difference. Elise Bryant was a freshman at the university in the fall of 1969. Coming from a mostly black neighborhood in Detroit, she was struck by the scarcity of African-Americans on campus. “You wouldn’t see any black people on the street,” she recalls, “and it became this custom that if you saw a black person on the street you would say, ‘What’s happening?’ And I remember when I would leave Ann Arbor and go to New York for a visit, or go back to Detroit, I’d start talking to every black person on the street, and it wasn’t the same. Sometimes there were weird reactions. People were like, ‘What are you talking to me for?’”

Once accepted at the university, black students continued to face prejudice and discrimination that was deeply entrenched in campus life. “It was that Northern brand of racism that was more subtle, that wasn’t blatant” explains Bryant. “I mean, all my friends were getting jobs as waitresses, and I applied to every restaurant on campus as a waitress and couldn’t get hired.”

Cynthia Stephens, a bright young African-American student who came to Ann Arbor in the fall of 1968 at age 16, remembers being told by her adviser to take a reduced course load. “I’m sitting there staring at her in amazement. I wasn’t Suma Cum Laude from Cass, but I had a 1300 SAT score, which qualified me in those days to make my own schedule without going to a counselor. And I was just like, ‘Are you looking at my record, or looking at me?’”

In the spring of 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a group of black students locked themselves into the UM administration building to protest the lack of support for minorities at the university. In response, the administration agreed to establish a Martin Luther King scholarship fund and appoint a few additional black administrators. Over the next year President Fleming (who replaced the retiring Harlan Hatcher) held discussions with black students that resulted in the establishment of a Black Studies curriculum and the opening of the Center for Afro-American Studies in the fall of 1969.

A Black Action Movement protest outside the Frieze Building in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

But for many, the integration of the university was simply not moving fast enough. In late 1969 representatives of most of the black student groups on campus came together and decided that a more proactive approach would be required in order to speed the process. The following January a series of talks were held between black students and university administrators regarding the matter of black enrollment, and a number of the students were invited to dine with President Fleming and further discuss the issues.

When the students arrived at the president’s house on the evening of Feb. 5, however, it wasn’t to have dinner but rather to hold a demonstration on the front lawn in which they presented Fleming with a list of demands. Chief among these was an increase in black enrollment to 10% – the percentage of the state population that was African-American – by the fall of 1973. Other demands included the hiring of additional recruiters for black students, the hiring of additional black faculty, the institution of new support services for black students, the establishment of a Black Student Center, the expansion of the MLK scholarship fund, tuition wavers for disadvantaged students, and a significant increase in the almost non-existent Hispanic student population.

“We do not expect the university to procrastinate and sub-committee these demands,” the statement concluded. “They are for immediate and positive action.” It was signed by “the United Black Population at the University of Michigan,” a coalition of a half dozen or so black groups from the various colleges and departments of the university. Soon they would adopt the much catchier moniker of the Black Action Movement, and bring the university as close to calamity as it would ever be during the entire period of student protest.

University of Michigan President Robben Fleming at a news conference during the 1970 Black Action Movement strike. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

The atmosphere was tense at the regents’ meeting on Feb. 19, when representatives of BAM appeared to present their demands in person. Although tempers occasionally flared, most of the regents expressed sympathy with BAM’s position. They refused to respond directly to the demands, however, and asked President Fleming to prepare an alternative proposal for their next public meeting in March. BAM stormed out of the room and a group of about 25 black students went to the Undergraduate Library and took hundreds of books off the shelves, forcing the building to close while the books were replaced.

The next morning BAM members gathered at the university’s administration building to again demand immediate action. When President Fleming and the regents once more refused, a larger contingent of black students went back to the library and disarranged thousands more books. Fleming responded by stationing Ann Arbor police officers at major university libraries.

In the coming weeks there were further disruptions, such as the interruption of classes to discuss the BAM demands, and the blockading of the Michigan Union snack bar. These actions were upsetting to many, but even so support for the BAM position was growing across campus.

Early in March President Fleming made a public announcement of his alternative proposal. It established 10% black enrollment as a “goal” rather than a commitment, and promised that the university would work toward achieving a number of the other BAM dictates, but only if additional funding could be found. Fleming contended in his 1996 memoir, “Tempests into Rainbows,” that it was primarily lack of funding that prevented the university from granting the BAM demands.

The regents held an open meeting on March 18 to discuss Fleming’s plan. Almost 500 people attended. An exhausting and at times heated debate – in which BAM referred to the administration’s proposal as a “nebulous, weasel-worded proposition” – ended without agreement. The BAM leaders called for a demonstration in nearby Regents Plaza the next day.

Protesters in 1970 marching across the University of Michigan Regents Plaza. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

On March 19, 1970, while inside the administration building the regents voted their approval of Fleming’s plan, outside was an angry rally in which the BAM leadership announced that the university’s black students were on strike and intended to close down the campus until their demands were met. Police were summoned and the gathering became a melee, with scuffles breaking out between law officers and demonstrators. Four students were arrested. Charges of racism were made against the Ann Arbor police because although a good proportion of the demonstrators were white, all of the arrestees were black.

The presence of significant numbers of white students at the March 19 demonstration underscores an important aspect of the BAM strike: the support it was given by the traditionally non-black activist groups on campus, such as Students for a Democratic Society. The participation of white students was crucial to the effectiveness of the strike, if for no other reason than there simply were not enough African-Americans on campus to be able to make a significant impact on the normal operations of the university.

On March 20 a group of about 200 picketers marched outside Hill Auditorium during the university’s Honors Convocation, at which President Robben Fleming was speaking. A party of white protesters entered the concert hall and marched up and down the aisles, fists raised in a Black Power salute, chanting “Open it up or shut it down.” BAM leaders were angry that the disruption of the ceremony had been undertaken without their approval. Through the Michigan Daily, the university’s student newspaper, BAM told its supporters: “If we don’t say do something, don’t you do it.”

Protesters at Hill Auditorium during a University of Michigan Honors Convocation. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Not everyone in BAM was in favor of accepting help from white activists. But it was eventually agreed that the non-black groups would be welcome as long as they remained in a subordinate role. Cynthia Stephens, who had become a leading figure in BAM – “I was the vice president, because in those days that was what women were” – recalls that many were worried that the white radicals, who were more experienced in managing protests, might try to take over. “In order for the strike to have been successful, whether we perceived it or not, we needed their support,” says Stephens. “But it needed to be support.”

Madison Foster, who was a junior faculty member and one of the leaders of the BAM negotiating team, thinks that to focus on the ethnicity of the strikers is to cloud the most important aspect of the protest. “It wasn’t just a black strike, or a white strike,” he says. “It was a student strike.”

By the following Monday, March 23, the moratorium was having a clear impact – to the surprise of almost everyone, including BAM itself. Picketers marched outside the main classroom buildings and class attendance was noticeably down. A number of professors and teaching fellows joined the strike and canceled their classes, while others held their classes off campus to show support.

The university presented a front of indifference. The Michigan Daily quoted one regent as saying, “The students can strike until hell freezes over as far as I am concerned.” President Fleming added, “As long as classes are being held, we don’t have to care whether people are going or not.”

Picketers block access to a university parking structure during the 1970 Black Action Movement strike. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

This outlook would change as the week wore on and the strike gathered momentum. Class attendance continued to drop. The School of Social Work, the Residential College, and the Institute for Social Research closed down. BAM and its supporters instigated additional disruptions, interrupting classes to talk about the issue of the strike, marching through hallways banging on trash cans, picketing in front of parking garages, and blocking traffic (someone “lost” a contact lens in the middle of State Street by the Michigan Union and a group of strikers spent an hour on their knees looking for it).

By Wednesday, attendance at the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA) was down an estimated 60%. More and more faculty were coming out in favor of the BAM position, and President Fleming offered to meet with black leaders at the bargaining table. BAM was feeling its power, however, and was not so inclined to make a quick settlement. By Thursday, LSA attendance was down an estimated 75% and the college was considering shutting its doors.

Then on Friday came what may have been the most crucial development, when the American Federation of State and County Municipal Employees announced its support of the strike. University employees who were AFSCME members refused to cross the student picket lines and campus food service came to a grinding halt. “The men and women of AFSCME were incredible,” remembers Cynthia Stephens, now a judge on the Michigan Court of Appeals. “It’s what made me initially decide I really, really, really wanted to be a labor lawyer.”

Elise Bryant concurs. “In my mind it was the union that made us strong. Because I think the administration would’ve let us spin our wheels until the end of the semester, then wait for the next crop of students to come in. Which is what they figured out after that – give them what they want and then they’ll be gone.”

Toward the end of the week the strike increased in intensity, with the disruptions taking on a more physical nature. Windows were being broken and other university property damaged. Some faculty and students were feeling threatened. But neither BAM nor President Fleming wanted violence, and both made great efforts to keep the situation under control.

Black Action Movement protesters on the University of Michigan campus in 1970. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

“We used conflict,” explains Madison Foster, “but we kept some of the hotheads from doing violent things, both black and white. We had to tighten up some people so they understood that there were consequences, if they were talking about blowing up something or doing something destructive, because we would end up being the ones that would be hurt.”

President Fleming was also under increasing pressure to bring the strike to an end, by force if necessary. “I credit Fleming for not escalating the conflict by calling in troopers, or by escalating his rhetoric,” Foster says. “In that sense he handled the situation well.”

But what is not generally known is that at an early point in the negotiations, Fleming – whose reputation as a leader at both the University of Wisconsin and UM rests to a large extent on his disinclination to use force to end student disruptions – threatened to bring in the military. “To me that was a very critical point,” says Foster. “Early on, after maybe the third session, he said flatly that if we didn’t abandon the buildings and do the things he wanted, he was going to call the National Guard. I was telling a friend that I probably made one of the boldest comments of my life, in hindsight. I said, ‘Well, I guess we’ll die,’ and we walked out. I wasn’t going to negotiate under threat.”

Foster’s recollections take on added significance when one considers that a little over a month following the resolution of the BAM strike, 13 student protesters were shot and four killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio, less than a day’s drive from Ann Arbor. Tensions were running high on the Michigan campus, and all across the country that spring. If the military had been called out to end the BAM strike, the results could have been tragic. Thankfully, they were not.

“We didn’t realize that people would really ever shoot at students,” says Cynthia Stephens. “It wasn’t real to us. If we had tried to start the BAM strike after Kent State, I don’t know if it would’ve happened. I also sort of wondered whether – and I don’t know this at all, because I didn’t know folk at Kent State – I wondered whether the measured response by the University of Michigan gave encouragement to the students at Kent State to believe that what happened there wouldn’t happen.”

Negotiations continued over the weekend but on Monday, March 30, the strike began to lose momentum. Class attendance was on the rise and food service had resumed. Some may have believed the strike to be over after the university announced on Sunday that agreement had been reached on nearly all points, despite an informal arrangement between BAM and the president that neither side would make public statements until the negotiations were completed. (Fleming claimed that the press release was a mistake, but it could also have been a canny political maneuver.)

Money had been found in the various colleges and departments of the university to support the desired increase in black enrollment, as well as many of BAM’s other demands. The only major point of disagreement remaining was whether 10% enrollment should be a “commitment” or a “goal.” The BAM leadership decided that it was time to settle.

“I think we reached a point where we believed we had gotten what we could get,” explains Cynthia Stephens. “We had achieved maximum victory from that event, and this wasn’t a winner-take-all contest.” Also, the students were becoming restless, she says. “It was getting to the end of the semester. They needed to graduate and finish classes.”

“And ultimately, how long we could keep external forces away” – i.e., the National Guard – “was also an issue.”

On April 1, 1970, it was announced that a settlement had been reached and the strike was over. The university pledged several million dollars toward the “goal” of reaching 10% black enrollment by the 1973-74 term. Programs would be established to recruit black students and faculty, aid and support services would be put in place for minority students, and the Center for Afro-American Studies would receive increased funding. However, there would be no Black Student Center, no tuition wavers, nor any additional funding for the MLK scholarship. Also refused was amnesty for students who would otherwise be disciplined for their actions during the strike.

BAM leaders staged a victory celebration that same evening. In an oral history interview given in 1978, Fred Miller of Students for a Democratic Society recalled the scene in the Michigan Union ballroom on April 1.

The night that they announced the settlement was one of the most incredible political events I’ve ever been at. They had a jazz band. The place was packed and the music sort of builds up to this peak, and in comes the negotiating team. Each member of the negotiating team gave a short speech. They had it really well orchestrated, and they were rousing speeches. The event created a real feeling that the struggle had been essentially won, and it left everyone feeling satisfied.

At the same time, the university administration was presenting the settlement as being in their favor, in that the final agreement seemed little different than the plan they had originally wanted to implement. “To assist a new generation of able, energetic black men and women to move into positions of responsibility and leadership will be an aspiration worthy of our greatest efforts,” said the regents in their official statement. Perhaps both sides’ claims of victory are equally valid.

The struggle to improve conditions for minorities at the university was far from over, however. The goal of 10% enrollment was never achieved. The UM black student population peaked at just under 8% in 1976, then began to decline. (Today it stands at 2,204 out of 41,674, or a little over 5%.) In addition, racial problems on campus caused the reawakening of BAM in the middle ’70s – BAM II – and late ’80s – BAM III.

“The lesson of the Black Action Movement is that we must keep our lamps trimmed and burning,” says Elise Bryant, who is now a professor at the National Labor College. “That the work doesn’t stop. There’s a song, ‘You’ve got to work for it, fight for it, day and night for it, pass it on, pass it on.’ And I think that’s the mistake my generation made, and I think I made, in terms of not reaching back and offering opportunities for the next generation, not giving them the history and the culture – because they’re not going to learn it any place else.”

“You have to leave the place better than you found it,” she says. “That’s what I was taught.”

Alan Glenn is working on a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s website for more information.

The crowd at Fuller Flatlands, site of the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival 40 years ago. (Photo courtesy of Bob Frank, www.bluelunch.com.)

Forty years ago this month, a great crowd of young people converged on a small, unsuspecting middle-American town for an incredible three-day celebration of peace and music. They sat on the cool grass of an open field, grooved to the tunes of a dizzying array of legendary performers, smoked pot, drank wine, and generally had a blast. It was a landmark event that is still spoken of in hushed tones of awe and reverence among music historians.

No, it wasn’t Woodstock. It was something similar, yet very different, something smaller yet in some ways bigger.

It was something called the Ann Arbor Blues Festival.

In early August 1969, two weeks before the mammoth fete in Bethel, N.Y., approximately 20,000 eager spectators came to the Fuller Flatlands on the banks of the lazy Huron River to hear an absolutely astounding lineup of living legends of the blues – B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Otis Rush, Magic Sam, Big Mama Thornton, Son House, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and on and on – at the first major blues festival in the United States.

Although the Ann Arbor event has been almost completely overshadowed by its big brother in New York, to many serious music fans – especially blues enthusiasts – it is by far the more important of the two. Writing in the October 1969 issue of Downbeat, critic Dan Morgenstern made his preference plain, dismissing Woodstock in favor of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which he declared was “without doubt the festival of the year, if not the decade.”

Choosing the Blues

But it wasn’t just the cultured music critics for whom the choice was clear. In the spring of ’69, Steve Wanvig was a 19-year-old blues fan living in Minneapolis. “I was working at an aluminum window and siding company,” he says, “when I heard about this massive rock show which was to take place in the summer, out in upstate New York.”

“I wanted to go,” remembers Wanvig, “but I was much more interested in the massive blues show which was to take place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, much closer. So I enlisted a high school buddy to drive his red ’67 Chevy Impala over there. Jim V (may he rest in peace) wasn’t even a big blues guy, but he was a good enough friend to provide transportation. We threw a tent and some sleeping bags in the car and headed east.”

Charlie Musselwhite performing at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

At that time Wanvig was particularly enamored of the magic harp (blues-speak for harmonica) of Charlie Musselwhite. “Musselwhite was to play in Ann Arbor; that did it for me,” says Wanvig, now an artist and graphic designer. “But besides him, you had the biggest collection of blues legends ever to perform on one stage. It was an absolute, stone-cold MUST for anyone who called themselves a blues fan. I chose the blues, and I’m glad I did.”

While Woodstock was remarkable largely because of the sheer size of its audience, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival was all about the music. “This particular happening did not attract even one-tenth of the 300,000-plus that Woodstock could boast,” wrote Dan Morgenstern in Downbeat. “Total attendance for the three evening and two afternoon concerts at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival was around 20,000. But everyone there had come to hear the music – not to make the scene – and the enthusiastic response was a joy to behold.”

Baby Boomer Blues

Most writers who attended the festival remarked upon the enthusiasm of the audience. Many also noted the striking contrast between the performers on the stage – mostly older, impecunious black men, with roots in the Deep South –and the spectators on the field, who were mostly young, white, and well-off. “It was an odd sight to see white youngsters besieging black men in their sixties and seventies for autographs,” wrote Hollie West in The Washington Post.

In hindsight, however, it shouldn’t have seemed all that odd. Throughout the 1960s there had been occurring what has been termed a “blues revival” – although that is something of a misnomer, since the blues had never actually died. Instead the phenomenon would be more accurately described as an awakening of interest in the blues in an audience that previously hadn’t paid it much attention – young, white, educated Americans.

Muddy Waters performing at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

The blues had first started to appear on the radar of the boomer college crowd in the early sixties, as part of the folk music explosion. A few African-American country bluesmen were booked into the coffee houses and were admired by audiences as purveyors of a truly “authentic” form of traditional American roots music. A number of popular white folkies, such as Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk, also included blues material in their repertoire.

The rise of interest in acoustic blues was followed by a surge of enthusiasm for the heavily blues-influenced rock ’n’ roll of the early British Invasion. The Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Who, and the Kinks were among the many English rock bands that – ironically enough – introduced scores of young American listeners to the blues, via rocking covers of blues standards as well as their own blues-tinged originals.

By the late sixties a new white blues-rock scene was in full swing on both sides of the Atlantic. Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield, Canned Heat, Steve Miller, Fleetwood Mac, Eric Clapton, and others made millions with their hybridized versions of black American blues. At the same time, most freely acknowledged the debt owed their African-American forbears, who in turn enjoyed an increase of interest in their work (although nothing on the level of the white performers).

Roots of the Festival

The Ann Arbor Blues Festival was the brainchild of a small group of University of Michigan undergraduates, led by John Fishel, a 20-year-old anthropology major. Music festivals had become quite fashionable in the late sixties, and Fishel remembers that there was interest on campus in putting together some sort of fete.

Promotional poster for the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Michael Erlewine, www.michaelerlewine.com.)

“Somebody put me in touch with one or two people,” he says. “It ended up with maybe four or five of us getting together. Some of us knew each other, some didn’t. We really didn’t have a concept at the time. We didn’t know whether it would be a series or a one-shot deal. We didn’t know whether it was an inside show in an auditorium, or whether it was an outdoor show. But I agreed to do the entertainment part of it.”

Having been a blues enthusiast from an early age, Fishel naturally wanted to make it a blues festival. The others were either of like mind or were easily persuaded, and so, nascent concept in hand, they set about putting the gears in motion. Fishel and several companions traveled to Chicago, then probably the biggest blues city in America, to make key contacts among the performers and promoters, and to get a better feel for the milieu.

Fishel put his knowledge of the genre to work, and expanded his horizons in the process. “I had a lot of records at the time and I had some sense of who was alive, who was still performing. But there was much more that I didn’t know and it sort of took me into a world that I remain very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be part of.”

Easy Money

Probably the most crucial part of the festival’s development was fundraising. In that the organizers were unbelievably fortunate. Somehow they persuaded two university-connected nonprofit entities – the University Activities Center (UAC), and Canterbury House, the student Episcopalian organization – to put up $70,000 for the event. (That’s a jaw-dropping $400,000 in today’s money.) “To this day, I’m still not clear why they said yes,” marvels Fishel.

Luther Allison performing at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Cash in hand, the small group of organizers began to develop the festival in earnest. It was decided to hold a try-out of sorts – a small, free blues concert – in the spring of 1969 in order to gauge potential interest. On one of their trips to Chicago they had discovered the perfect artist for such an event: the then-unknown guitarist Luther Allison.

“We sort of discovered Luther Allison,” says Joel Silvers, another of the festival’s organizers. “He was playing in this very traditional West Side club where most of the people were fresh from the South. I don’t know who initiated the conversation with him, but he was absolutely delighted to find any interest whatsoever in a university or a white audience for the kind of music that he was performing.”

Allison came to Ann Arbor in late April for a four-hour free show in the ballroom of the student union. At first the audience was small. But, as John Fishel remembers, “he started to play, and it was electric. People just started to pour in from all over the campus.”

As the performance wrapped around midnight, the planning committee were all smiles. The blues had passed the test; the community had responded. The show would go on.

Radical Blues

Today many may wonder why Ann Arbor – a small, Midwestern town, far from the South, with a tiny black population – should have been the site for the country’s first major blues festival. But consider that the core of the white awakening to the blues in the 1960s were the free thinkers, political activists, and countercultural rebels – and that in those days Ann Arbor was a major center of anti-establishment activity, home to all those types and more.

Festival organizer Bert Stratton recalls that in those days to like the blues was to be part of an exclusive, rebellious club. “It was like a secret language. If you were a young white kid who was into the black blues you thought you were pretty cool. It was an identity search on our part. We wanted something that was totally authentic, as opposed to what we were, which was not, I guess,” Stratton says with a chuckle. He explains that listening to performers like Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters was a sure-fire way to annoy the “straights.”

Joel Silvers remembers that in the sixties there was a politicized subculture that followed American roots music. “A lot of these people were white,” he says, “but had their roots in the civil rights movement. These were people who were both counterculture and highly politicized in some way or another. I mean they were still college students. They weren’t necessarily marching in Selma, but they were absorbing this sense of a black-white cultural alliance that was still possible in 1969.”

“Within a couple of years,” he adds, “between black power and whatever happened in terms of a cultural backlash or political backlash, a lot of white kids were no longer as interested in authentic black music, so it was a bit of a short-lived phenomenon.”

Part of the radical agenda in the late sixties was a rejection of mainstream white culture in favor of that of minority groups, especially African-Americans. From early on the festival organizers had decided that it would feature predominantly black performers. This decision was made not only to help right the wrongs that black artists had been suffering for decades, but also to expose concertgoers to the roots of the blues, with which many were expected to be unfamiliar. Festival organizer Cary Gordon told The Washington Post, “I feel the blues is a black phenomenon, and assuming there will be more blues festivals after this, we felt the first festival here should be devoted to first-generation blues.”

Bert Stratton remembers that at the ’69 festival it was unofficially decided that black attendees would be let in without charge. Not that it much mattered, he says. “I don’t think we had more than 50 black people in the audience at any one time.” He also suspects that although their hearts were in the right place, the organizers were unwittingly insulting those they intended to help. “It would have been totally embarrassing for any black person to say, ‘I want to get in for free,’” he says.

“This Is So Beautiful”

The first Ann Arbor Blues Festival got underway at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, August 1, 1969. Over the next two days attendees would be treated to nearly 24 solid hours of the best and most authentic blues music the country had to offer, old and new, from country blues to city blues and everything in between. Some reviewers had minor complaints about one or two of the performances, but overall critical opinion was glowing. Norman Gibson of The Ann Arbor News perhaps summed it up best, writing simply that “the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival in history was a success from almost any point of view and those who arranged it can be proud of the results.”

The audience was, if anything, even more enthusiastic than the experts. Many performers received heartfelt standing ovations, and the moving, quiet performance by the venerable Son House that closed the festival brought tears to the eyes of many. Dan Morgenstern wrote in Downbeat that “the performers – especially the veterans – were treated with respect that bordered on reverence. It added up to a kind of recognition that blues artists have seldom, if ever, received from their own people.”

For their part the performers were more than happy to bask in the unaccustomed glow of appreciation that the festival audience gave. To many it was the most amazing thing in which they had ever taken part. Michael Erlewine, a guitarist who played in a local blues band, helped out behind the scenes at the festival and had a chance to interview many of the performers. He recalls that James Cotton told him, “I’ve never seen nothin’ like this in my life. This is the beautifulest thing I ever seen in my life. This is so beautiful.”

B.B. King performing at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Festival organizer Ken Whipple related a similar story to The Michigan Daily, about how he met B. B. King coming off the stage after finishing his set. “He put his arm around me,” Whipple said, “asked me my name and said what a great thing it was that he was able to be here. There were tears in his eyes. It’s the greatest thing in the world.”

It was also a sad fact that most of the performers were thrilled with the money. “The Blues Festival is a dream for some of these guys, not for the prestige but because they need the bread,” John Fishel told The Michigan Daily. “These guys will play two nights a week from 8 until 5 in the morning and only get $30. And even if they do get a chance to make a record, they usually get screwed.”

One of the more significant aspects of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, in the opinion of music promoter Dick Waterman, was that it was the first to pay black bluesmen a commercial wage. “Others such as Newport, Berkeley, UCLA, Mariposa, et. al., insist on $50-a-day-plus-travel,” wrote Waterman in 1969, “which is fine for an act that is making a regular living – Baez, Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary – but hard on the bluesman who needs the festival for exposure but also needs it for actual living money.”

In this the Ann Arbor event served as an example to other music festivals, for even though the dozens of performers were paid a commercial wage, the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival not only recouped its original $70,000 investment, when all was said and done it had made a profit of about $200.

Ann Arbor Blues Part Deux

Following the unprecedented success of the first Ann Arbor Blues Festival, there was no question that there would be a second. There was a new group of organizers (including a few of the originals such as John Fishel), but they planned the second festival to be much the same as the first, on a slightly larger scale, given the bigger budget that was allotted by UAC and Canterbury House, who once again were sponsoring.

The success of the first festival brought more attention from the media for the second. The 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival was another astounding artistic success, a joyous experience for audience and performers alike that earned the raves of critics from Downbeat, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and newspapers across the country.

Financially, however, it was a disaster.

As early as Sunday afternoon, festival organizers realized that they were going to post a loss of nearly $20,000, an amount that would be ruinous to the sponsors.

The second festival appears to have suffered much more than the first at the hands of gate-crashers. It also had the bad luck of taking place the very same weekend as a giant rock festival near Jackson, at a park called Goose Lake. That event boasted an impressive roster of popular acts, including Chicago, Rod Stewart, Bob Seger, John Sebastian, and Jethro Tull, and would draw an estimated 200,000 attendees over three days. The Goose Lake Festival is an intriguing story in its own right – barbed wire, sanitation problems, emergency food deliveries, overzealous security, drugs being sold openly like concessions – but in relation to the Ann Arbor Blues Festival it is usually cast as the grinch who stole Christmas.

Undoubtedly, Goose Lake did have a negative impact on attendance at the Ann Arbor event. But in fact the figures seem to show that attendance at the second festival was roughly the same as the first. What must also be considered is that organizers spent more money on the second festival, and at the same time lowered ticket prices by almost 30%. This was done in hopes of attracting more attendees, but in hindsight may have been a critical mistake.

Moreover, the overwhelming success of the first festival, with its lineup of performers who were virtually unknown outside the world of blues freaks, may have led the planners to be a bit overconfident. Two weeks before the festival, The Washington Post reported that tickets would be limited to 15,000 “because festival organizers want to emphasize the music and not the event as a happening.” The Post quoted one of the organizers as saying – somewhat ominously, in light of what would happen – that they were trying to make the event “as esoteric as possible.”

This was perhaps not the wisest course of action, especially with so much money on the line.

Whatever the reason, however, the damage had been done, and the future of the festival was in peril. In hopes of making up the loss, and saving UAC and Canterbury House, festival organizers put out a plea for donations. They also turned to some high-profile blues-rockers for help. John Fishel explains:

“Johnny Winter came in 1970 as a guest, appeared back stage, hanging out. He then went on stage with Luther Allison, and they played together, to the delight of the audience. When the festival lost money, we went back to him and asked him if he would do a benefit.” Winter readily agreed, and played at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena a week later, along with some of the other performers from the festival. Fishel recalls that enough money was raised to make good the loss.

Fishel also remembers a tantalizing might-have-been. “We were also trying to get the Rolling Stones to come and we got pretty close. Their schedule didn’t allow them to do a benefit. Maybe if they had been there we would have raised sufficient money to not only pay the debt off, but also to continue the thing in ’71 and it might have been a different reality.”

As it was, despite the repayment of the loss, the university was not about to risk another such financial calamity, and the request for a third festival in 1971 was turned down. It seemed that the brilliant light that had shown on the blues in Ann Arbor the two previous years had been snuffed out.

Rainbows to the Rescue

All was not lost, however. John Sinclair was a hippie activist living in Ann Arbor who had come to national attention when in 1969 he was sent to prison for 10 years for giving two joints to an undercover policewoman. His unusually harsh sentencing became a cause célèbre, attracting such notables as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Allen Ginsberg, Jane Fonda, and John Lennon. The two-year campaign to free him culminated in a huge rally at the University of Michigan’s Crisler Arena, at which Lennon, Bob Seger, Stevie Wonder and others performed.

Released from prison shortly thereafter, Sinclair was looking to get back into the fray, but perhaps in a less controversial way. In 1968 he had co-founded the White Panther Party, which was modeled on the Black Panthers, and adopted that group’s highly confrontational stance toward the mainstream American establishment – including, ironically enough, the condemnation of white culture espoused by the Black Panthers.

While Sinclair had been in prison, however, the White Panthers had softened their tone, and changed their name to the Rainbow People’s Party, reflecting a new outlook that promoted peace and brotherhood. Sinclair had been a fan of black music since early childhood, and reviving the artistically successful Ann Arbor Blues Festival seemed like a perfect project for the freshly-minted Rainbows.

So Sinclair joined forces with local music promoter Peter Andrews to form a company unconnected with the university, Rainbow Multi-Media, and put on a new festival. But this time around there would be no talk of being esoteric. Jazz, soul, and blues-rock were added to the bill, in hopes of attracting a wider audience, and bigger-name acts were booked, such as Ray Charles, Count Basie, Miles Davis, James Brown, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, and Booker T. & the M.G.’s.

The revamped Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival would run for three years, starting in 1972. Despite the changes instituted by Sinclair and Andrews, the new festivals would follow much the same course as the original two: each would be hailed as an artistic triumph, but financially would flop. After the disastrous 1974 festival, which had to be moved to Canada at the last minute because the newly-Republican Ann Arbor City Council refused to grant a permit, Sinclair called it quits. Once again it seemed that the light had gone out.

Ann Arbor Blues Redux

Peter Andrews had not given up, however. He kept the artistic ideals of the festival burning and in 1992 the Ann Arbor City Council was once again persuaded (without much difficulty: the vote was unanimous) to grant a permit for a revitalized Blues and Jazz Festival.

This time the festival would have its longest continuous run, surviving for nearly a decade and a half. But once again the familiar pattern would emerge: artistic success, financial failure. After the last festival in 2006 an accumulated debt of nearly $60,000 remained on the books.

The festival is now on what seems to be permanent hiatus. Peter Andrews is pessimistic about the possibility of another revival. There are too many blues and jazz festivals today, and to compete would require headliners that would make it nearly impossible to make money – a far cry from 1969, when Ann Arbor was host to the first major blues festival in history, and obscure but talented artists could draw a crowd.

The crowd at Fuller Flatlands for the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival. (Photo courtesy of Bob Frank.)

Legacy

Although the Ann Arbor blues are no longer being sung, the festivals have left a rich legacy of which all can be rightfully proud. Especially the first two events, which brought together a lineup of blues maestros that had never been seen before – or will ever be seen again. The fact that the organizers were barely old enough to vote makes it all the more amazing.

John Fishel reflects on those early days with a mixture of pride and nostalgia. “I think the Ann Arbor Blues Festival did many things. It inspired the many blues festivals that came after. It resulted in a group of people who were primarily from Chicago creating a magazine, Living Blues, the first American magazine that was devoted to this type of music, a magazine that really became sort of the gold standard for those that were into it.”

“A number of labels were created as a result of the festival,” he continues, “people who came and got inspired because they heard people that they hadn’t heard before and went into the business, somebody like Bruce Iglauer, who created Alligator Records. It was a catalyst, which is wonderful.”

After a pause, he says simply, “It was magic.”

Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the sixties. Visit the film’s website for more information. While there you can contribute your memories of that time – and read those that others have contributed – in a public forum set up expressly for that purpose.

June 17, 1969: Officers confer as the crowd swarms on to South University. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Ann Arbor, like many college towns, is usually a quiet place during the summer months. Most of the students are away on break, the university goes into hibernation, and a calm descends upon the city as residents sit back to enjoy a few months of peace and quiet.

During the turbulent 1960s the summer break was even more eagerly anticipated, offering as it did a brief respite from the regular succession of student-led sit-ins, protests, demonstrations, and strikes that occupied the fall and winter months. But the influx of large numbers of non-student “street people” (i.e., hippie youths) in the closing years of the decade made those last few summers of the ’60s decidedly less peaceful.

Forty years ago this week, the normally sleepy summertime streets of Ann Arbor were violently awoken by a series of violent and occasionally bloody clashes between police and a motley crowd of hippies, radicals, teenagers, university students, and town rowdies. Ostensibly at issue was the creation of a pedestrian mall, or “people’s park,” on South University Avenue – a four-block shopping district adjacent to the University of Michigan campus that caters primarily to a student clientele.

Even in those “interesting” times, the violence in Ann Arbor attracted national attention – including that of J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. After the fighting was over, the national press lost interest and moved on to other, juicier topics. But on the local scene the repercussions of that summer would reverberate for years after.

The Detroit Free Press would refer to the four nights of conflict as “The Battle of Ann Arbor.”

The First Night

The existence of many widely-varying accounts makes it difficult to determine exactly what transpired during the disturbances. It seems that it all started at about 10 p.m. on Monday, June 16, when a uniformed Ann Arbor police officer attempted to ticket a motorcyclist for doing wheelies in the street. According to a report published by the White Panther Party, a locally-headquartered anti-establishmentarian organization, within a short time a group of around 50 street people gathered and began to quarrel with the officer, who called for backup. By the time the additional four patrol cars arrived, the increasingly hostile crowd had grown to nearly three hundred. The officers withdrew without ticketing the cyclist.

Exultant in their apparent triumph over the police, the crowd decided to hold a spontaneous “liberation party” in the street. A block of South University Avenue was barricaded by parked cars, garbage cans, tires, wooden planks, and other items ready at hand. The crowd, by this time swelled to anywhere from five hundred to a thousand, proceeded to enjoy several hours of dancing, drinking, fireworks, and motorcycle stunts. (One imagines that there was a certain amount of marijuana being smoked, as well.)

The Ann Arbor News reported that at some point during the evening a couple had engaged in “sexual relations…on the pavement of South University, surrounded by cheering young men and women.” Other newspapers also reported the event. The Washington Post stated that “at least one couple had performed the sex act in the street.” The Chicago Tribune went one better, reporting “two lewd acts in the street.” Interestingly, the UM student-run Michigan Daily, a paper not generally known for its modesty, does not appear to have reported “at least one overt sexual act” until more than two months later.

Damages resulting from the festivities were surprisingly minimal. A few slogans were painted on parking signs and windows, and one or possibly two windows were broken. Even more surprising, after the party broke up at around 1 a.m., a number of youths returned with brooms to sweep up debris from the street.

Shadow Police Presence

On this first night, a few plainclothes city police officers were sent to the South University area as observers. They made no attempt to interfere with the revelers, mainly because, as Detective Lieutenant Eugene Staudenmaeir told The Michigan Daily, police intervention would have caused an “instant riot.”

However, Ann Arbor Police Chief Walter Krasny did request that the Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Department and the Michigan State Police post in nearby Ypsilanti send additional officers on a standby basis. None of these were deployed on the evening of June 16. Two days later, The Daily would quote Krasny as stating that no police action was taken that first night because of “limited manpower.”

People’s Park

Almost exactly one month earlier, in Berkeley, California, attempts by an assorted group of radicals and hippies to turn a vacant lot into a communal garden and living space – dubbed People’s Park – were ruthlessly crushed with lethal force on the orders of Governor Ronald Reagan.

The events in Berkeley sent shock waves through the American Left, and were undoubtedly still fresh in the minds of many Ann Arbor radicals, including the White Panthers, who early on Tuesday issued a statement calling for the transformation of the South University shopping area into a pedestrian mall, or people’s park. Their choice of names was undoubtedly deliberate and intended to rouse local radicals to action by associating the events in Ann Arbor with those in Berkeley. The allusion worked so well (at least at first) that The Detroit News would claim that activists from Berkeley were behind the Ann Arbor disturbances.

Although a large proportion of Ann Arbor’s anti-authoritarians were in full agreement with the demand, some felt that it was an attempt to infuse a simple display of public merrymaking with a revolutionary significance that was simply not there. Student editorialists for The Michigan Daily asserted that “to most of the celebrants, the take-over was an act of care-free rebellion, not a means to obtain power, appropriate property, or even induce reform.”

The fact that police did not intervene on Monday night tends to add weight to the argument that local radical elements were – at least to some extent – attempting to manufacture an issue of contention between law enforcement and the countercultural community. There were also few, if any, substantive comparisons to be made between the events in Berkeley of a month earlier and the Monday night street party.

The Second Night

Many in the crowd on Monday night and early Tuesday morning were heard to say that they would attempt to hold another street party in the same place the next evening. As the day wore on rumors began to spread that something heavy would be going down in Ann Arbor on Tuesday night. The prospect of a street battle between hippies and police attracted people from all over Southeast Michigan to the South University area. Some came out of morbid curiosity. Others hoped for a chance to strike a blow at “the man.” Reporters and photographers from the Detroit papers and some farther afield descended upon the city, hoping to witness something newsworthy.

June 17, 1969: Youths confront officer on South University. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

None would go away disappointed – although some would have reason to regret their presence on South University that evening.

Word of the impending gathering quickly reached the ears of police. According to The Ann Arbor News, a group of high-ranking law-enforcement officials, including Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Harvey, Ann Arbor Police Chief Walter Krasny, and Prosecuting Attorney William Delhey, spent Tuesday afternoon “laying plans for a show of force if the ‘street liberations’” were to occur again. The police perspective was neatly summed up in a statement later made by Krasny: “We are going to control the streets of Ann Arbor and not give it to a bunch of people who think they own it.” City and university officials were apparently informed of the planned police actions well before the fact.

By the early evening of Tuesday, June 17, the South University area began to fill with people, many of whom were obviously gawkers attracted by expectations of violence. A force of nearly two hundred city police officers and county sheriff’s deputies had assembled at the east end of South University, near Washtenaw Avenue. Over a hundred additional officers were on their way, mostly from nearby agencies but some from as far away as Oakland County.

Minor confrontations between police and the crowd began around 8 p.m. By this time the gathered throng had swelled to over a thousand, with some estimates going as high as twenty-five hundred. Barricades were once again being erected, and many people were dancing and milling about in the street, blocking traffic. At around 9 p.m. Deputy Police Chief Harold Olson used a bullhorn to order the crowd to disperse. When that elicited little or no response, Olson instructed the riot-equipped officers to advance and clear the street.

June 17, 1969: Officers subdue an arrestee. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

As the wave of lawmen swept westward down South University, most of the crowd retreated, but some began to hurl rocks, bricks, and bottles. Sheriff Harvey ordered repeated blasts of tear gas fired into the area, apparently on discovering that projectiles were being thrown from rooftops.

In this first sweep it took about an hour for police to clear the street. Twenty-five people were arrested. After this, groups of officers moved about the area using night sticks and rifle butts to urge pedestrians to keep moving. The Michigan Daily reported that at two different times small contingents of police charged some distance into the UM campus to break up groups of students who had gathered there, at least once using smoke or gas. Some of the students who were set upon by officers claimed to have been simply leaving the library after an evening of study.

After the initial sweep the South University area remained relatively quiet until about midnight, when a crowd began to gather near to University of Michigan President Robben Fleming’s house. Fleming had emerged from his home some time earlier to try to mediate between the crowd and police. While Fleming was engaged in dialogue with the crowd, a passing contingent of officers launched a smoke bomb into the area, apparently without provocation.

June 17, 1969: An injured officer after having been hit by a projectile. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

The crowd near Fleming’s house soon swelled to around eight hundred. Police drew up shoulder-to-shoulder in battle formation to the east of where the youths were massing. Fleming spoke with Sheriff Harvey, urging restraint. Harvey made no effort to disguise his contempt for the president’s advice, reportedly calling Fleming a “smart ass.” Deputy Chief Olson, however, granted the president a few minutes to try to disperse the crowd peacefully. But when an officer was hit by a thrown brick, Harvey and Olson ordered their men to advance and “clear them out.”

Once again South University was engulfed in a conflict that would not have seemed out of place on a Stone Age battlefield – one side swinging clubs and the other hurling rocks. The retreating crowd soon broke into smaller groups that police chased down side streets. More tear gas was fired into the area, and an additional twenty-odd arrests were made.

It was all over by 2 a.m. In total, nearly 50 people had been arrested, about half of whom were charged with “contention in the street,” a misdemeanor. The other half were charged with violating Michigan’s new riot statute, put in place following the Detroit race riots of 1967. “Inciting a riot” was a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison and/or a fine of up to $10,000.

Not Chicago All Over Again – But Worse than Detroit

Shortly after the conclusion of Tuesday night’s fracas President Fleming issued a statement that was generally supportive of police actions but criticized of the use of tear gas, saying that “it tended to excite the crowd perhaps more than it helped.” Otherwise, he felt that “the police exercised remarkable restraint.”

June 17, 1969: University President Robben Fleming confers with Deputy Chief of Police Harold Olson. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Ann Arbor Mayor Robert Harris was even more supportive of the constabulary, at least in his initial statements. In an open letter to the university community, he attempted to defuse anger at the police. “The sad events of last night were not a ‘police riot,’” he wrote. “They were not Chicago all over again.” Harris was referring to the infamous confrontations between police and demonstrators in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Detroit News photographer James Hubbard disagreed with Harris’s assessment. Hubbard was present for most of the Tuesday night conflict, and condemned police conduct as “shocking and unbelievable,” saying by way of comparison, “I spent eighty hours on the streets during the 1967 Detroit riots and I never saw police behave that way.” Hubbard reported that he was clubbed several times on the legs and back, as were many other reporters and photographers. During the final sweep of South University Hubbard “saw 15 to 20 cops chasing one guy. One knocked the guy down and others ran up and began clubbing and kicking him.”

It must be noted, however, that for their part the demonstrators were not entirely innocent of violence. Fifteen police officers were reported to have been injured by projectiles, and some newsmen reported being hit with rocks thrown from the crowd. Deputy Chief Olson was struck in the chest and groin with rocks, and Sheriff Harvey suffered cuts from broken glass. At one point a number of incendiary devices – variously described as cherry bombs, fire bombs, or (improbably) Molotov cocktails – were launched at police, with one officer receiving a serious leg injury as a result. A seventeen-year old boy was also arrested and charged with felonious assault after allegedly attempting to stab Deputy Chief Olson.

Wednesday Afternoon Rally

Despite the fact that most reports placed very few university students among the rioters, in those days anti-authoritarian sentiment ran strong among the UM student body. A hastily-assembled alliance of campus radicals and student government officials called a rally for the afternoon of Wednesday, June 18, to collectively decide on what immediate action, if any, should be taken as a result of the previous night’s confrontations.

Nearly a thousand people attended the rally. A vote was taken as to whether or not the group should demand that South University be closed to make a pedestrian mall. By most accounts the result was a resounding “no.” Attendees were generally unreceptive to speakers who advocated for continuation of the confrontations with police, but many in the crowd showed an inclination toward further conflict.

The Third Night

Urgently desiring a peaceful end to the conflict, university and city officials decided to organize a rock concert on campus for the evening of June 18, hoping to draw people away from the South University area. The concert began at 8:30 p.m. in Jefferson Plaza in front of the university’s Administration Building, about half a mile from where the previous night’s altercations had occurred. More than two thousand people showed up for the free entertainment.

In addition to rock music, attendees also heard speeches by President Fleming and Mayor Harris. In his speech, Harris modified somewhat his position on the police actions of the previous night. He continued to defend the behavior of the Ann Arbor Police. But he boldly stated that he would not defend the actions of Sheriff Harvey or his deputies.

When several in the crowd shouted condemnations of the sheriff, Harris replied, “I share your concerns about Sheriff Harvey,” then added, “There is nothing I know that I can do about that problem.” As sheriff, Harvey had jurisdiction throughout the whole county, including the city of Ann Arbor, and was not subject to the oversight of city officials. Harris also promised to set up a committee to look into the creation of a pedestrian mall in the contested area.

June 18, 1969: Officers drawn up across East University Avenue. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

No police were in evidence at the concert. A short distance away, however, nearly three hundred lawmen from six different agencies lined the curbs of South University Avenue. An armored car with machine guns mounted in its turret sat menacingly in the street, and a police helicopter hovered watchfully overhead.

As the evening wore on, thousands of spectators made their way through the South University district, strolling the sidewalks or driving slowly by in their cars. But those hoping to witness another display of violence would be disappointed. The streets remained peaceful. A holiday atmosphere pervaded the area, with pedestrians chatting good-naturedly with law officers. By 11 p.m. the crowds had dwindled and the police withdrew.

Soon after the withdrawal, however, a crowd began once again to form in the street, blocking traffic. As the gathering swelled into the hundreds, university faculty and local clergy attempted to persuade the growing mass of people to break up and go home. Police were ordered back to the scene a little after midnight.

June 18, 1969: Police dog and armored car on South University. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

Nearly two hundred officers were deployed on either end of South University. Deputy Chief Olson ordered the crowd to disperse, then five minutes later signaled the advance. Police swept eastward and westward in a pincer movement, rifles leveled, bayonets fixed. The crowds were herded off South University and on to side streets. Around twenty additional arrests were made, with two civilian injuries reported. No injuries were reported among law enforcement personnel. By 2 a.m. the streets were all but deserted, and police left the area.

The Case of Dr. Edward Pierce

The conduct of both lawmen and demonstrators on Wednesday evening was markedly  less pugnacious than that of the previous night. But more tales of police brutality soon began to emerge, perhaps the most striking of which was that of Dr. Edward Pierce, a physician who had responded to a request from university students for a trained medical presence on the scene. In addition to being a doctor, Pierce was also a former city councilman and mayoral candidate, and had been chairman of the local Democratic Party.

Pierce said that without provocation police officers knocked him to the ground, struck him repeatedly with billy clubs, and dragged him for 30 yards along the pavement to the bus that served as a paddy wagon. The Ann Arbor News quoted an unnamed police official as stating that Pierce had “attempted to cross a line of officers,” an accusation which the doctor denied. Pierce was arrested and booked on a felony riot charge. Within a few hours he was released, the felony charge having been dropped for “lack of evidence.”

The Fourth Night

During the rock concert on Wednesday evening, city officials and university faculty had circulated among the crowd, engaging in open dialogue with the young people in attendance, urging calm. Encouraged by the relative success of these efforts, city officials decided to gamble that a contingent of civilian peacekeepers would be more effective at maintaining order than would another show of force by the police.

An agreement was reached between city government and law enforcement officials to keep 175 officers and state troopers on standby at a staging area near South University while city officials, university faculty, and White Panthers worked together to calm the crowd and keep the roadway clear. The evening of Thursday, June 19, would see no uniformed police presence on the streets.

Although the situation became tense at times, the results of the “no cops” approach cannot be called anything but successful. For the most part the streets were kept open. There was no violence other than what might be expected in a large crowd where alcohol was being consumed freely – and in which members of the God’s Children Motorcycle Club were present. Mayor Harris came twice to the area to talk with the gathered young people and urge them to go home. By midnight the crowds had thinned significantly. Around 2 a.m. it began to rain hard, sending the last few holdouts to seek cover.

The Battle of Ann Arbor was over.

About one month later, South University Avenue would be barricaded once more – but this time there would be no bayonet charges or tear gas barrages. It was the annual Street Fair, the tiny predecessor to today’s mammoth Ann Arbor Art Fairs. On the same four blocks where a month earlier rocks, bottles, and obscenities had been flying, and no little amount blood had been spilled, respectable townies mingled peacefully with the hippies, eating ice cream, browsing the art, and perusing sale merchandise on the sidewalk.

The Aftermath

That tranquil setting, however, belied the deep-seated animosity that continued to exist between conservative-minded townsfolk and the bohemian street people. Over the following weeks, the majority of the letters published in The Ann Arbor News about the South University disturbances were strongly pro-police or anti-hippie, often both. Some were quite passionate in their condemnation of the street people. One writer wanted to “form a Pied Piper Club to rid the town of rats,” i.e., hippies.

On the other hand, letters published by The Michigan Daily were almost universally anti-police, and especially anti-Harvey. The sheriff, who was known to have his men cut the hair of young people sent to the county jail, was the arch-enemy of much of the town’s non-conformist crowd. A recall effort directed against Harvey that had been mounted by radicals a week before was given a considerable boost by the South University affair.

June 19, 1969: Mayor Robert Harris circulates among the crowd on South University. (Photo courtesy of Jay Cassidy.)

The sheriff was not the only one to be loudly criticized for his actions during the disturbances, however. Mayor Robert Harris, in office barely two months when the streets exploded in violence, was attacked from both sides – from the right for not hitting the hippies hard enough, and from the left for not doing enough to hold back the police, especially Sheriff Harvey.

Harris was only the second Democrat to hold the office of mayor in Ann Arbor in nearly forty years. Soon after the riots, a Republican-led group called Concerned Citizens of Ann Arbor started its own recall campaign against the mayor and the Democrats on city council. Although none of these succeeded (neither did the recall of Sheriff Harvey), Republicans would win back the mayorship four years later, in part by playing off the Democrats’ supposed over-tolerance of hippie-led disturbances such as those on South University.

Harris, who had publicly criticized Harvey’s conduct during the disturbances, also found himself of the receiving end of reciprocal verbal assaults from the sheriff. Harris’s own city police force even turned against him, openly stating their dissatisfaction with his handling of the South University affair. Oddly, they seem to have been angry at not being allowed to put themselves in danger by forcefully clearing the street on Thursday night.

The Battle for Ann Arbor

The Battle of Ann Arbor, fought on a few blocks of city streets over four mild June nights in 1969, should probably be counted as a draw. The radicals and street people did not succeed in “liberating” South University. But the forces of law and order were not much more successful. Of the approximately seventy persons arrested during the fracas, only a handful were convicted, mostly of misdemeanors. Many charges were dismissed without trial. As near as can be determined, none of the more than thirty who were arrested on felony charges of inciting a riot were found guilty of such.

Ultimately the issue at stake was not the making of South University Avenue into a pedestrian mall. Rather it was a deeper conflict between two seemingly incompatible ways of life. The “straights” had made Ann Arbor their home for more than a century. The hippies had come to Ann Arbor only recently, but were now also calling it home. Each group wanted to the city to be a place where they could conduct their lives in the manner they thought best. Each felt the other was undermining their efforts.

The same situation was being played out to varying degrees in hundreds of towns and cities across the country during the 1960s. In Ann Arbor the conflict of long hair with short, new ideas with old, and youthful abandon with middle-aged restraint would last longer than in most other areas. In the decade following the South University conflicts, the balance of power would first tip one way, then the other. For example, Ann Arbor’s (in)famous “five-dollar pot law” would be enacted in 1972, then repealed in 1973, then reestablished as an amendment to the city charter in 1974. The city’s marijuana laws have remained a subject of contention ever since.

The Battle of Ann Arbor was only one part of a larger struggle, the Battle for Ann Arbor – a struggle that in some ways remains unresolved to this day.

About the writer: Alan Glenn is currently at work a documentary film about Ann Arbor in the ’60s. Visit the film’s Web site for more information. While there you can contribute your memories of that time – and read those that others have contributed – in a public forum set up expressly for that purpose.