There Went The Neighborhood - Studio Interview: Curtis Davis
When: May 24, 2021
Curtis Davis attended Jones School in kindergarten and first grade. When the school closed in 1965, he was bused to Allen Elementary. He remembers being raised by his mother Dorothy Slay and participating in sports including hockey and tennis.
This interview was filmed during the making of the documentary film There Went The Neighborhood: The Closing of Jones School, produced by the Ann Arbor District Library and 7 Cylinders Studio. More interviews are available in the There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive.
Transcript
- [00:00:05] DONALD HARRISON: This is the Jones School project. Thank you for doing this.
- [00:00:10] CURTIS DAVIS: You're more than welcome.
- [00:00:12] DONALD HARRISON: Curtis, just really start off with the basics of your name and where you grew up.
- [00:00:20] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, my name is Curtis Davis. I grew up at the corner of Fourth and Beakes Avenue, in the Kerrytown area, as we know it now. I currently live in Denver, Colorado. I lived in that area until I was approximately 20 years old. From the time I was four years old until the time I was 20 years old, I lived at the Fourth and Beakes address. I'm back visiting my mother.
- [00:00:57] DONALD HARRISON: What kind of work do you do now?
- [00:01:00] CURTIS DAVIS: I'm a systems engineer, Linux admin, application support person. I do enterprise scale computer applications.
- [00:01:14] DONALD HARRISON: Cool. How would you describe what it was like when you grew up and where you grew up?
- [00:01:20] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, I guess the best way to describe that would be a neighborhood. A neighborhood made up of many families, many children, and extended family as well. Mothers, grandmothers, aunts, uncles, grandfathers, and all of their offspring. The neighborhood was bustling. It was a pretty tight knit area. Most of the people there were aware and pretty intricately involved with each other. On a first-name basis, knew families by families and location. It was great. It was a wonderful time to be a kid in Ann Arbor, because there was always that overriding feeling of safety because you knew everyone and everyone knew you. I pretty much had free rein of where I could go. In fact, if anything was not savvy, I knew mom would hear about it somehow. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it was a great neighborhood to grow up in.
- [00:03:00] DONALD HARRISON: When you think back, Curtis, to that time, to your childhood, what are the things that stand out the most? Obviously, the close-knitness, [OVERLAPPING] the generations.
- [00:03:09] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure.
- [00:03:09] DONALD HARRISON: Are there any other things that really stand out for you?
- [00:03:13] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, you have to consider the times. They were the early '60s. When I was a young child there was a Black enterprise zone there as well, which we know as Ann Street and Lower Main Street. There were, I guess, you would call them bodegas today, but there were corner stores everywhere, usually run by Polish Americans or some Greek Americans. But they were in the Black community, so you had access and you had relationships with those people as well. A lot of those ethnic groups, they actually lived in the neighborhoods as well. Even though it was predominantly Black, they had a very integral part of the day-to-day life in that area. Of course, there's always the farmers' market and the Farm Bureau, where the people from Chelsea and Pinckney and Saline would come to sell their wares on Wednesdays and Sundays. There were a lot of Black organizations that I was able to be involved with. One, as a child and low-income child, the Black Panther Party provided breakfast and meals, if in fact you needed it. There was the Model Cities Program that was an offshoot of a government program, I believe it was CETA, that came out of the Carter administration, I believe. They provided some summer employment for kids in the neighborhood. You had access to Summit Park, West Park, Vets Park, the Sunset Street parks that were there by the old Elks Lodge, which was very well established in the neighborhood, and provided a rudder for some of the activities that went on in the Black community. It was a pretty enjoyable place to grow up as a Black child. Yeah, it was.
- [00:05:53] DONALD HARRISON: I'm going to have you talk about Jones. But right before you do that I'm just curious in terms of just some of the basics of growing up, siblings. Did you have siblings?
- [00:06:04] CURTIS DAVIS: Yeah.
- [00:06:05] DONALD HARRISON: Also, what your parents were doing for work at that time.
- [00:06:09] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, yeah, I have a younger brother and a younger sister. My mom worked a lot, besides being involved in some of the neighborhood organizations. My mother, being a single mom, I believe, she worked at Chrysler Corporation. I think she worked at King Seeley's, that was down off of Ashley and Liberty, I believe it was. She also got her cosmetology license. She did some hair. She married into one of the larger families in that neighborhood, and they lived directly across the street, and they still have a footprint there as well. One of the brothers does. He still owns a home there, on Fourth and Beakes. I believe he was a factory worker as well even though he wasn't my biological father. That's what they did and they had busy schedules. Me, I was heavily into sports. I took it upon myself to find funding for myself to play baseball and to play hockey, was a big sport that I played. A lot of the city projects provided funds through the park systems for kids, especially during the summers, to go down there and they'd have college kids come and run these programs, and you'd learn how to play box hockey or braid or, a lot of the suburban high school kids would come down and ice skate. As I evolved as a child, I got into organized hockey, met some of the ownership up at Stein & Goetz Sporting Goods on Main Street was a fixture. All of the merchants along Main Street, they got to know the kids in the neighborhood pretty well. Through that, I was able to get hand-me-down hardware to play sports with. It just evolved from there.
- [00:08:40] DONALD HARRISON: Where were you playing hockey?
- [00:08:41] CURTIS DAVIS: I played for the Ann Arbor Hockey Association. We played at the Coliseum down on Fifth and-
- [00:08:48] Dorothy Slay: Yost.
- [00:08:48] CURTIS DAVIS: Yost. I believe was on Fifth and Hill. I lose some of the streets as I grow older, but yeah. Played there for years and played over at Fuller ice rink and out at Vets Park. Wherever there was a slab of ice I'd play.
- [00:09:07] Dorothy Slay: Ask him.
- [00:09:13] DONALD HARRISON: [LAUGHTER]. Oh, you can-.
- [00:09:16] CURTIS DAVIS: What was that you wanted me to answer, mom? [NOISE]
- [00:09:21] DONALD HARRISON: About the fact that you could not get on ice because you were Black kids.
- [00:09:27] CURTIS DAVIS: Yeah. I was one of the first Black kids to start really playing organized hockey. As I evolved my skills and became a proficient hockey player, I tried out for the high school team for a couple years. I think I tried out my freshman, sophomore, and junior year, and I got cut each year. I didn't make the squad. That was heartbreaking for me, and I didn't understand it. But as I've grown into maturity, I've let those resentments go because I know it wasn't because of my ability, but the reality of the times that I was growing up in.
- [00:10:25] DONALD HARRISON: Late '60s and Pioneer?
- [00:10:27] CURTIS DAVIS: Oh, no, I started at Huron in 1974. That was at Huron High School. I got cut each year that I tried out, but I ended up evolving into a tennis player. I was like, okay, you're not going to let me play high school hockey here. I'm an athlete. I'll play tennis. I did. That was a heartbreaking period, but we got by. Now my son's a professional baseball player. It all works out.
- [00:11:15] DONALD HARRISON: That's great. Let's shift to school because I'm curious, maybe tell me which schools you went to, K-12.
- [00:11:24] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure.
- [00:11:25] DONALD HARRISON: Then I am curious, we want to focus in on Jones [OVERLAPPING].
- [00:11:28] CURTIS DAVIS: Right.
- [00:11:29] DONALD HARRISON: And your experience for the first couple of years there.
- [00:11:31] CURTIS DAVIS: Well [OVERLAPPING].
- [00:11:32] DONALD HARRISON: What was your--all the schools you went to?
- [00:11:34] CURTIS DAVIS: You know, kindergarten and first grade was at Jones School. It was a collage of all the neighborhood kids that I knew very well. Then the first year of busing, I think it was '63 or '64. I went to John Allen, out on Towner Boulevard.
- [00:11:59] Dorothy Slay: Bussed.
- [00:12:00] CURTIS DAVIS: Yes, I was bussed there, I'd catch the bus at the Old Farm Bureau there on Fifth Avenue and Kingsley Street. Then after John Allen, I went to Tappan Junior High. My circle of friends, because Tappan was--I don't know if it was closer or not but I guess I had more range at that point so my circle of friends became larger and also my ability to get there and back without a bus was equally available to me. I had a bicycle [LAUGHTER]. I had two really strong legs. Then after leaving Tappan, I went to Huron High School. I didn't go to college here in Ann Arbor. I did go for a semester to Washtenaw Community College, but I determined at that point with the path, my life was taking, some of the challenges that present themselves to a young Black man in Ann Arbor with a very, yes, you're fine, you're okay mentality, it was time for me to leave. I left at 20 years old. One of the defining moments was my high school counselor telling me, don't worry about taking the SATs or the ACTs because I don't think you're college material, just don't worry about that stuff. For me, that was kind of a microcosm of the vibe that I got throughout my childhood being a Black child in Ann Arbor. I didn't let that define me.
- [00:14:19] DONALD HARRISON: I'm curious if you then jump back to Jones, because that's where you started school-
- [00:14:22] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure.
- [00:14:23] DONALD HARRISON: What was it like then, this is the last couple of years. Was that something you experienced there as well? I mean, you were pretty young so it might have been present [OVERLAPPING].
- [00:14:34] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, at Jones School, I really found that the administration and faculty that I had contact with, they were very loving and caring people but the fact that me myself is probably different than a lot of children because I didn't have a lot of the learning challenges that a lot of kids had. They were very nice and wonderful people, but I knew that they weren't of our community, and I knew that they didn't have a lot of involvement with my family or my community. They were just at school. They were, I mean, you could have put a poster on the wall with an audio feed and maybe some video and I would have probably gotten the same vibe. They're nice enough people but they're not invested. Yeah, but just being a child that young, all I was looking for was some attention, a little positive feedback, and for me emotional issues were not a problem. Learning and literacy issues were not a problem. Just being an outgoing person, it wasn't a problem. I didn't have any social real deficits. Yeah, I was able to negotiate those years really well and I had a lot of really good friends and and experiences there. When it came to busing, that was kind of like what? [LAUGHTER]. But being flexible, rolled with it and it increased my circle of friends and opportunities as well.
- [00:16:45] DONALD HARRISON: Curtis, I'm curious how you describe the student body like when you were there at first grade. Predominantly Black and kids that you knew from the neighborhood.
- [00:16:56] CURTIS DAVIS: Right.
- [00:16:56] DONALD HARRISON: Teachers, mostly white, all white and then like you said, not really involved in that neighborhood.
- [00:17:03] CURTIS DAVIS: Correct.
- [00:17:06] DONALD HARRISON: Would that describe it or how would you--?
- [00:17:08] CURTIS DAVIS: That would accurately describe it for sure. Yes, I would hear stories from the older kids and people in the neighborhood about everybody there went to Jones and I'm like, Okay, well that's probably where I'm going to end up going, you know, until that change took place but yes. The faculty themselves, like I said, nice enough people but I didn't feel that they were of my neighborhood or invested in. Being primary school stuff, teachers just want to make sure kids socialize themselves well and get the basics going. For me, that wasn't an issue but for other kids, it was. I don't think those issues were probably addressed adequately.
- [00:18:12] DONALD HARRISON: When you were in first grade and you heard it was going to close and you were getting bussed.
- [00:18:17] CURTIS DAVIS: Right.
- [00:18:19] DONALD HARRISON: I mean, you said it was sort of surprising.
- [00:18:21] CURTIS DAVIS: Right.
- [00:18:21] DONALD HARRISON: Did you feel like that made sense that you could see that you were maybe not getting as good education or were you upset that you were having to leave schools?
- [00:18:34] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, initially, yes. Initially I was like, why do I have to go way over here and start over almost with people I don't even know. At that point prior to the busing taking place, I didn't know white or Black or whatever. I knew skin color but that didn't define people for me. That was just another person. It's just a different shade of brown [LAUGHTER] or whatever, but the logistics of why do I have to go all the way over there, there is a perfectly fine school right here but you had the influences of media and current events coming to you through television and so you're like, oh, okay, so this is what John F Kennedy and the administration is trying to accomplish. This kind of goes hand in hand with Lyndon Johnson and the Equal Rights Amendment and kind of trying to understand, put this together. Why go through all this and put me on a bus for an hour and a half a day or whatever and there's a perfectly fine school there. Yeah, it kind of evolved, the understanding of it.
- [00:20:13] DONALD HARRISON: As first grade, I was going to ask at that age, your sense of racism and within Ann Arbor, I think it was still quite a bit in terms of places you weren't--
- [00:20:27] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure.
- [00:20:29] DONALD HARRISON: Maybe allowed to go.
- [00:20:30] CURTIS DAVIS: Right.
- [00:20:31] DONALD HARRISON: Even though that was changing. But at that age, was that something that you felt or experienced yet?
- [00:20:39] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure. Because like I said, our community was downtown and most of the merchants were on upper Main Street. Sure you'd feel the vibe was you walk down Main Street with all the shop owners and how they would address you or conduct themselves when you were around. You knew that there was an edge and they didn't know you so what else could it be related to? Yeah. Black parents have their history with racism and so they've acquired some racist behaviors themselves. They tell you don't go out of your way with white people because they're not necessarily what you expect or they won't treat you how you maybe deserve to be treated. All of those things melt together to kind of develop a sense of what your bubble looks like.
- [00:22:03] DONALD HARRISON: When you think back on that time of your childhood, what also sort of stands out from you, other things? I don't know if you know Roger, he was talking about slaughterhouses.
- [00:22:14] CURTIS DAVIS: Oh, yes. Oh, sure.
- [00:22:16] DONALD HARRISON: Are there things that when you think back come up for you right away the most as far as the area, that school, that time?
- [00:22:24] CURTIS DAVIS: Oh, yes, I had a wide circle of friends and family. There was always a baseball game or a basketball game breaking out, there were homes where kids would collect with their bicycles and yeah, just like Roger said, the sports piece, I mean, the slaughterhouse being right down there, Lansky's Junkyard down on Main Street was a place you could kind of explore. Along the riverbanks down on Barton, just kind of a mix of day-to-day adventures.
- [00:23:14] DONALD HARRISON: As far as the dynamic, and you were there just the first couple years. Do you remember the dynamic between students and would you say it was pretty much mostly Black by that point or it was [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:23:29] CURTIS DAVIS: Jones?
- [00:23:30] DONALD HARRISON: Jones.
- [00:23:30] CURTIS DAVIS: Let's say it was 85 percent Black. There weren't a lot of white kids joining the French Dukes. [LAUGHTER] That was an organization that was in the neighborhood and founded by the Elks up on Sunset. But there were white kids and families who, I don't know the ethnicity, I'll just go by skin color. They were part of the neighborhood. They were just as cool as me. [LAUGHTER]
- [00:24:05] DONALD HARRISON: In terms of fights and conflicts, is that something that you remember? Because I heard stories later as kids got older and went to other schools. [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:24:14] CURTIS DAVIS: That did happen.
- [00:24:14] DONALD HARRISON: That happened?
- [00:24:15] CURTIS DAVIS: But I was in Tappan already. When that whole angst came out with Martin's assassination and that whole thing, I already had moved on and acclimated to another environment. There was another set of questions that I was trying to get answered at that point, but as far as racial tensions at Jones School, no. Not really. We knew that after six o'clock, all the white or suburban people were going to leave. [LAUGHTER] As soon as the street light came on, they were all gone. They'd come down and conduct their business on a daily basis, and when it was time to go home, they left the neighborhood. The people who lived there would be there to go ahead and enjoy themselves.
- [00:25:25] DONALD HARRISON: Were you referring to it then as Kerrytown or that name became much more [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:25:32] CURTIS DAVIS: We just called it the farmer's market at that point, because that was the Farm Bureau where those farmers would come and get their feed and their hay and sell their wares on the weekends and on Wednesdays. No, Kerrytown was not a part of that. There was a big Greek influence there, because there were Greek families in the Greek Orthodox Church there. We all lived in the same neighborhood in harmony pretty well. It was pretty obvious that this was a pretty tight knit neighborhood, and the whole Kerrytown piece didn't even exist.
- [00:26:22] DONALD HARRISON: As you got into middle school and high school, and you left when you were 20, and you saw it change in that time. Then now when you come back and visit and looking at what it is now, I'm curious what your sense was when you're in your teenage years as it was changing, and how you would also look back on it now.
- [00:26:44] CURTIS DAVIS: Right. Well, as I come back and look at it from the outside in, it's kind of sad. It's sad in the overall aspect, because as you said at the beginning, this is taking place all over the country. For that piece of it, it sends me back to the five-eighth's human feeling that we're going to colonize this area as well, because this appeals to us. As a child growing up in high school and in that neighborhood as well, I knew it was changing. But I didn't spend a lot of time there as a high schooler, because my expansion, my sense or ability to get out into the world had expanded so profoundly. I spent a lot of time in the suburbs with my friends, and I came home and slept and ate and had friends. My friends were let's say caught up in the system, a lot of them, so they weren't around and their parents were getting older. At a high school age, it was a place that I lived, but I didn't really spend a lot of time there, because I was in sports and I was always at an event or doing something else. But it was gradually changing and the sadness of the change was pretty evident because of the stories that came out of that time. I mean, the incarceration rate was incredible. Police were a very taboo organization especially in downtown Ann Arbor for a Black person, and it still goes on. I mean, it's the same. Now I come back and it's like, "Oh, here's the village of Ann Arbor." It reminds me of Boulder, Colorado--it's Birkenstocks and tofu. That's fine and well. It's just not the history of this neighborhood.
- [00:29:46] DONALD HARRISON: Do you ever think back if Jones hadn't been closed, how different things might've been in terms of your education if you'd stayed in Jones through eighth grade? Or if you think back on that now, in some ways, that it sounds like it expanded your world a bit [OVERLAPPING] outside the neighborhood.
- [00:30:07] CURTIS DAVIS: It did.
- [00:30:07] DONALD HARRISON: But it also broke apart that sense of community, so I don't know. [OVERLAPPING].
- [00:30:13] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, the inequity is always financial, so even if in fact Jones had still existed, what would have been the injection of interest financially for the neighborhood? It boils down to that. I mean, in most of these gentrified neighborhoods, it's like you were not able to generate enough tax dollars in that neighborhood to be of any consequence to the powers that be. So blow it up, start over. Literally, my wife is a retired teacher. They actually use the term, we're going to blow the school up and turn it into a charter school. I mean, that's [LAUGHTER] not a very friendly term on a grand scale. It's not generating enough tax dollars, so blow it up, and let's make it something else.
- [00:31:28] DONALD HARRISON: All right. Now, looking at that whole area, there's the river, there's the thing that's close to downtown. It's right next to downtown.
- [00:31:37] CURTIS DAVIS: Sure.
- [00:31:37] DONALD HARRISON: At some point, it became, again, cleared a certain business interest that that was more valuable. But I guess is there anything else you'd want to add, because I want to make sure we leave time for your mom as well. Are there any other things that for you feel like, from your perspective now looking back on it, really stick with you or come to mind the most?
- [00:32:04] CURTIS DAVIS: Well, at this point in time, it's really interesting that I'm doing this because I am trying to decide, do I want to keep a footprint there? Is it economically viable for me to keep a footprint, or should I let it move on, because I'm at that position. It's interesting that you even called and Roger called me. Because I'm making these decisions, it's one of the reasons I came here this week. I own other properties in Ypsilanti, but this property is sentimental. It's very important to me, and so I have a decision to make. This could possibly push me in one direction or another. We'll see.
- [00:33:06] DONALD HARRISON: No easy answers.
- [00:33:07] CURTIS DAVIS: No.
- [00:33:08] DONALD HARRISON: I think part of the appeal of understanding more and doing this is that it's not a simple [OVERLAPPING] right and wrong in terms of [OVERLAPPING]
- [00:33:18] CURTIS DAVIS: It's complicated.
- [00:33:19] DONALD HARRISON: It's complicated.
- [00:33:20] CURTIS DAVIS: It really is.
- [00:33:21] DONALD HARRISON: It's complicated.
- [00:33:21] CURTIS DAVIS: Yeah.

Media
May 24, 2021
Length: 00:33:22
Copyright: Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held by: Ann Arbor District Library
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Subjects
Jones School
Jones Elementary School
Ann Arbor Public Schools
Ann Arbor Farmers Market
Washtenaw Farm Bureau
Black Panther Party
Model Cities
Hockey
Ann Arbor Public Schools - Desegregation
Allen Elementary School
Tappan Junior High School
Huron High School
French Dukes Precision Drill Team
racism
LOH Education
LOH Education - Jones School
Education
Local History
Oral Histories
Race & Ethnicity
There Went The Neighborhood Interview Archive
Curtis Davis
Dorothy Slay
401 N Division St