[News] A haven from Jim Crow - Michigan resort town stirs anew

[Anti-Imperialist News]

See below for quotes from Mabel Williams. She has 
been central to preventing the loss of Black 
property ownership and the creation of and 
preservation of Idlewild - family home to her and Robert F Williams.

Also check out our audio CD featuring Mabel and Robert's history!
http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html

We interviewed her in their family home and 
toured Idlewild with their son, John. Truly an 
amazing place with a significant history!


www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-idlewildjul03,0,7855102.story
chicagotribune.com

A haven from Jim Crow
Michigan resort town stirs anew with proud tales 
of its role since 1912 as a vacation spot for African-Americans

By Ron Grossman
Chicago Tribune correspondent
2:02 AM CDT, July 3, 2008
IDLEWILD, Mich ­ It's a 4 1/2 -hour drive to here 
from the South Side of Chicago­which, in the bad 
old days, could seem an eternity to families seeking a vacation from Jim Crow.

Before the civil rights movement, black Americans 
weren't just hemmed in by Southern legal systems 
and Northern ghettos. Travel was tough. Hotels 
and restaurants were mostly off-limits.

But this North Woods resort town was an oasis for 
African-Americans from Chicago, Detroit, 
Cleveland and points between. Under towering 
evergreens, blacks could enjoy the ordinary 
summertime pleasures­boating, fishing, swimming, 
hanging out at the roller rink­that others took for granted.

The era that included big-name entertainers at 
local nightclubs came to a close when civil 
rights legislation opened motels and resorts to 
one and all. Idlewild seemed less necessary once 
blacks could travel any road they chose­including 
one that now might just take an African-American 
through the front door of the White House.

It's an idea that some longtime Idlewilders can 
scarcely permit themselves to even think of.

"Their whole lives have been defined by wanting 
something­simple equality," said Mary Trucks, who 
heads a community-development agency. "They say, 
'Is it really possible it'll happen while we're alive?' "

John Meeks first came to Idlewild for a weekend 
in 1954 and settled here to open a motel in 1994. 
In between was a lifetime of petty insults and 
gross discrimination that leaves him both 
"excited but a realist" about the possibility of 
a President <http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/>Barack Obama.

On his first day as a schoolteacher in Detroit in 
the 1950s, Meeks sat at a lunch-room table 
alongside two white teachers. They left. When his 
car broke down in Indianapolis, he had to stay 
overnight while it was repaired. A garage 
mechanic told him about an African-American woman 
who took black travelers into her home.

"Back then, you didn't take a holiday from Jim Crow," said Meeks, 85.

Haven founded in 1912

Except in Idlewild, he added. It was founded in 
1912 by four white couples who had a hunch there 
was a market for resort property among 
African-Americans, and bought 2,700 acres around 
the shores of Idlewild Lake, in north-central 
Michigan. Advertisements in the Chicago Defender 
newspaper offered lots for a dollar down and a dollar a month.

Among those who bought property was Daniel Hale 
Williams, a black physician in Chicago. He formed 
a partnership to build a lakeside hotel and 
restaurant in Idlewild. Anne Hawkins, a Chicagoan 
who summered in Idlewild for 82 years, recalls 
seeing Williams when he was old and she was young.

"When he was very ill, Dr. Williams would lie on 
the porch of his home here," Hawkins said. "To a 
child, he was just an old man, but my parents 
made sure I was aware of the contribution he had made."

In 1893, Williams performed the first fully 
successful open-heart surgery. He accomplished 
that breakthrough at Provident Hospital in 
Chicago, which he had founded. He died in 1931 in his Idlewild residence.

Hawkins' father and mother built a home in 
Idlewild just before she was born in 1926. She 
grew up shuttling between carefree summers here 
and the realities of life in Detroit, where her 
father was an electrical contractor. As a 
teenager, she and a schoolmate went to a downtown 
restaurant, only to be told it didn't serve blacks.

"We broke out in Spanish," Hawkins said. "So they 
had to serve us. We'd studied the language in high school."

For her generation, the beach was the teenagers' 
Idlewild hangout. By her children's generation, 
that role had been taken over by a roller rink.

"Now, someone will come knocking at my screen 
door, saying he knew my son from the rink," 
Hawkins said. "Because of segregation, people 
used to come to Idlewild from as far away as 
California. You met people from all over the country."

And sometimes married them, noted Clara Thompson. 
"Ours was an Idlewild romance," she said.

Thompson was from Chicago; her late husband Floyd 
was a Detroiter. They met one weekend in the 
1950s at the Paradise Club, a now-vanished Idlewild nightclub.

Thompson, one of the town's 784 year-round 
residents (in summers, the population grows to 
about 5,000), thinks of herself as a newcomer.

"But when I first came, I started listening to 
the old people who have since gone to glory," 
said Thompson, 80, who is a fount of local lore.

Big in 'chitlin circuit'

There is only a small general store and a bar 
remaining in Idlewild, but Thompson recalls when 
there were so many businesses that two policemen 
were needed to control weekend traffic. Idlewild 
was a linchpin of the "chitlin circuit," a round 
of vaudeville venues played by black entertainers.

"We wore our furs for an evening out," Thompson 
said. The Flamingo Club hosted full revues, with 
comedians, singers and chorus girls. On Sundays 
there were young people's matinees. No liquor was 
served, and the comics cleaned up their act.

"Lottie the Body and the other showgirls covered 
up a little bit more," said Thompson, who, along 
with Meeks, is promoting greater awareness of Idlewild's role in black history.

<http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html>Mabel 
Williams and her husband, Robert Williams, wrote 
a chapter of that history before settling here in 
the 1970s. An unassuming woman, she and her 
husband came to Idlewild by way of North Carolina, Cuba and China.

Robert Williams wrote "Negroes With Guns," a book 
that was both an autobiography and a philosophy: 
He advocated that blacks needed to arm themselves 
because police wouldn't protect them from the Ku 
Klux Klan. Years later, the idea was picked up by 
the Black Panthers. By then, Williams was in exile.

After 1959 demonstrations in Monroe, N.C., the 
Williamses eventually fled to Cuba, where Robert 
Williams broadcast back to the U.S. on a station called Radio Free Dixie.

A few years later, they left Cuba and settled in 
China, where they came to know Mao Zedong. But as 
the cultural climate in the United States 
changed, the Williamses returned and moved to 
Idlewild, where Robert Williams died in 1996.

Shortly before their return, Mabel Williams 
recalled, a group of black radicals meeting in 
Detroit proclaimed a "Republic of New Africa," 
naming Robert Williams its president-in-exile.

Today, an African-American is running for 
president­of the whole of America and on a 
major-party ticket. Could she have imagined that 
during their years in exile? Mabel Williams was 
quiet for a moment. The sun was setting over 
Idlewild's peaceful waters and towering trees.

"Well," she said, "we always believed that one person could make a difference."

<mailto:rgrossman at tribune.com>rgrossman at tribune.com
Copyright © 2008, <http://www.chicagotribune.com/>Chicago Tribune





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