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<font size=3>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.<br><br>
Also check out our audio CD featuring Mabel and Robert's history!<br>
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html</a><br><br>
We interviewed her in their family home and toured Idlewild with their
son, John. Truly an amazing place with a significant history!<br><br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-idlewildjul03,0,7855102.story" eudora="autourl">
www.chicagotribune.com/travel/chi-idlewildjul03,0,7855102.story<br>
</a><b>chicagotribune.com<br><br>
</font><font size=4>A haven from Jim Crow<br>
Michigan resort town stirs anew with proud tales of its role since 1912
as a vacation spot for African-Americans<br><br>
</b></font><font size=3>By Ron Grossman<br>
Chicago Tribune correspondent<br>
2:02 AM CDT, July 3, 2008<br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
It's an idea that some longtime Idlewilders can scarcely permit
themselves to even think of.<br><br>
"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?' "<br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/">Barack
Obama</a>.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"Back then, you didn't take a holiday from Jim Crow," said
Meeks, 85.<br><br>
<b>Haven founded in 1912<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"We broke out in Spanish," Hawkins said. "So they had to
serve us. We'd studied the language in high school."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
And sometimes married them, noted Clara Thompson. "Ours was an
Idlewild romance," she said.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
<b>Big in 'chitlin circuit'<br><br>
</b>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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
<b><a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/RFW.html">Mabel Williams and
her husband, Robert Williams,</a></b> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"Well," she said, "we always believed that one person
could make a difference."<br><br>
<a href="mailto:rgrossman@tribune.com">rgrossman@tribune.com</a> <br>
Copyright © 2008, <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/">Chicago
Tribune</a><br>
<br><br>
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