Joann Castle - What My Left Hand Was Doing: Lessons from a Grassroots Activist

PRAISE FOR
WHAT MY LEFT HAND WAS DOING: Confessions of a Grassroots Activist

When Joann Castle chose to devote her life to the community, rather than a convent, she stepped into the epicenter of political struggle in Detroit. Her unique perspective as a white woman offers a searing, unflinching account of black and white political activism in the 60s and 70s. The social justice in the marrow of her bones inspires a memoir that lacks neither truth nor passion. Its another Detroit story we all need to know.

Herb Boyd,
author of Black Detroit: A Peoples
History of Self- Determination

If one wants to understand how a white Catholic working-class girl, who grew up in a relatively conservative, racially insensitive environment, became a political activist, a crusader for social and racial justice, and later a committed revolutionarythis poignantly written, sensitive memoir is a must-read. This is a story about America, slated to be a classic of American literature.

Michael Goldfield,
author of The Color of Politics:
Race and the Mainsprings of American
Politics and The Decline of Organized
Labor in the United States

Joanns life story, which unfolds during one of the most intense times in Detroit history, will resonate with social justice mothers struggling with racial injustices today as well as inspire the activists of tomorrow.

Rashida Tlaib,
community and environmental activist,
former state representative, and recipient
of the 2017 Presidents Award from
the Audubon Society

What My Left Hand Was Doing is powerful proof that while we do not choose the times we live in, we do choose how to respond to them. Joann captures rarely documented responses to the black revolution of the 1960s. She shares the courageous choices she made and the spiritual, personal, familial, religious, and political challenges these choices created Joanns life gives substance and grit to the words of Grace Lee Boggs: These are the times to grow our souls.

Rich Feldman,
James and Grace Lee Boggs Center

Copyright 2018 by Joann Castle

Published in the United States by Against the Tide Books, P.O. Box 44793, Detroit, Michigan 48244

www.againstthetidebooks.com

This book flows from my all-too-human memory, which is, at best, imperfect. To protect anonymity, in some instances I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of people and places. Events and conversations have been reconstructed to the best of my recollection.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of a phonographic recording; nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise copied for public or private useother than for fair use as brief quotations embodied in articles and reviewswithout prior written permission of the publisher.

Page 319 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

Cover design: Kristine Mills / bklyndesigner.com
Interior design: Cindy Shaw / CreativeDetails.net

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University for their generous support and assistance. And to Dennie Maloney, who shared with me his diary entries from the period surrounding the Detroit Rebellion.

Front cover: Mike Hamlin still, courtesy of Finally Got the News , a Blackstar Production; Anti-STRESS contingent, courtesy of Ken Castle; Joann Castle, courtesy of Ken Castle. Spine: 12th Street rebellion, from Detroit News Collection, courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Back cover: Frank Ditto, courtesy of Ken Castle; cops on 12th Street, public domain; Father William Cunningham, from Detroit News Collection, courtesy of the Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University; Castle-Hamlin children at West Boston Boulevard house, from the authors collection

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017959583
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-0-9886714-09-9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1st edition, February 2018
Printed in the United States of America

This work is dedicated to Viola Liuzzo,
whose story compelled me to begin the journey o f a lifetime.
And to my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren,
who hold our future in their hands.

These are days when no one
should rely unduly on his competence.

Strength lies in improvisation. All the
decisive blows are struck left-handed.

Walter Benjamin
German philosopher, 1882-1940

What resemblance more perfect than that between our two hands! And yet what a striking inequality there is!

To the right hand go honours, flattering designations, prerogatives: it acts, orders, and takes. The left hand, on the contrary, is despised and reduced to the role of a humble auxiliary: by itself it can do nothing; it helps, it supports, it holds.

The right hand is the symbol and model of all aristocracy, the left hand of all common people.

What are the titles of nobility of the right hand? And whence comes the servitude of the left?

Robert Hertz
Anthropologist and Sociologist, 1913, France

CONTENTS

WHAT MY LEFT HAND
WAS DOING

It has always been the many faceless men, those foot soldiers,
who have suffered most, who have died. It is they who make a nation.

F. Sionil Jos

The unfamiliar keystrokes on the page give it away: these are old documents, made when people still used typewriters to create official records. Emblazoned across the top of each report are the words, in all capitals, DETROIT POLICE DEPARTMENT. Each one is directed to the commanding officer, Intelligence Division. They are all photocopied versions of the originals. Black masks the names of the people conducting the surveillancethe names of the detectives assigned to the subversive Red Squad and the identifying numbers of their informants.

Scanning the pages, I feel a kind of odd out-of-body sensation: Im reading someone elses words, seeing through someone elses eyes, but the people and the places are familiar to me. I was there. The years at the top, ranging from the late 1960s to the early 70s, are the years during which I was heavily involved in radical social justice movement work. These were the years of J. Edgar Hoovers COINTELPRO crackdown on dissidents. Each report details some objectionable event or activity that apparently demanded surveillance. In some of them an informant, pretending to be one of us, reports back to the police what he or she saw and heard. In others the police themselves are posing as activists amid us, at our meetings, at our protests, in our homes watching and listening.

In each report my name appears somewhere, misspelled ironically, also in all caps: JOANN CAROLE CASTLE.

Im not alone, of course. In one, from some of the early days of the Ad-Hoc Action Group Against Police Brutality, the agent reports that Sheila Murphy led a discussion about the reality of policing in the ghetto, how the only concern for police is the protection of property, which the people do not have. When the people riot to let the world know theyve had enough of how theyre being treated, the police move to protect the property and kill the people. I was there taking notes. Sheila was describing how to identify unmarked police cars.

You can tell by the small radio antenna in the rear window, she noted.

Theyre taking our license plate numbers, I said. We should take theirs.

Yes, Sheila agreed. Watch out for any and all unmarked police cars that you see, such as at police headquarters and precinct stations, and get their license numbers so that a list can be made up for the membership of Ad-Hoc and any other interested groups.