Relentless Warrior: Al Wheeler - Ann Arbor's First Black Mayor

Sat, 12/28/2024 - 9:33pm

When: 2024

"It's been 50 years since Al Wheeler’s historic campaign for Mayor of the City of Ann Arbor. 2024 marks the 30th anniversary of his death. Relentless Warrior lifts up little-known facts of Dr. Wheeler’s amazing saga.  From humble beginnings to a whirlwind tour of top educational institutions, we share how Professor Wheeler shaped and shared a life of firsts with his equally impressive wife, Emma, and their accomplished family. We also hear from some of the people who knew Al best and helped him become the first Black Mayor of Ann Arbor, as well as win re-election with a one vote, precedent-setting result.” - Filmmaker Carole Gibson

Transcript

• [00:00:09] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: We are going to be able to do something about implementation of civil rights through the power of economics and voting and political action, and I think that that's what's going to have to be done.
• [00:00:36] NARRATOR: Do you know Al Wheeler?
• [00:00:39] JACKSON LOPER: Al Wheeler.
• [00:00:43] FENGRONG WANG: That's a tough question.
• [00:00:45] JOANNE BEEMON: Wait, I'm putting my sunglasses back. They're my age defiers.
• [00:00:50] MICAH WASHINGTON: He was maybe like a mayor?
• [00:00:55] LAUREN KEMINT: The first Black mayor?
• [00:01:00] FENGRONG WANG: I don't know. Tell me.
• [00:01:02] YODIT MESFIN JOHNSON: One word to describe Dr. Wheeler, is freedom fighter.
• [00:01:07] LINH SONG: A change maker.
• [00:01:10] OMER JEAN DIXON WINBORN: My mentor.
• [00:01:12] MATTHEW MCDADE: We gathered together some members of the Wheeler clan to talk about their family patriarch. We put this question to them. How would you describe AI Wheeler?
• [00:01:22] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: Wise.
• [00:01:24] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Caring.
• [00:01:24] MATTHEW MCDADE: Loving. He said, "Be good to each other and always have courage to right the wrongs." That was wise and caring and loving [LAUGHTER]
• [00:01:39] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: I grew up in a poor family and I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, which was part of Southern state. I could ride the street cars, but I couldn't go in the theater downtown and all that stuff. I went to an all-Black public school system, and I just thought I was as good as the next guy.
• [00:02:01] NARRATOR: Surviving the troubled home was the first of many accomplishments. The 1920s saw Al moving in with his aunt and grandmother. His Aunt Bernice was a college graduate and grade school teacher. She made sure young Al did his homework and took advantage of every opportunity his school had to offer.
• [00:02:17] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: He had people in both the neighborhood and in the school who recognized his talent and who were instrumental in his education and growth. He was in a high school that fostered a lot of talented children.
• [00:02:42] NARRATOR: His family sacrifice paid off, and at 16-years-old Al graduated from the prestigious Sumner High, the first high school for Black students west of the Mississippi. Choosing to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania on scholarship proved to be a pivotal decision in Al's life. Lincoln is the nation's first historically Black institution to grant college degrees. Earning a biology degree at just 20-years-old could mean the end of academic life for anyone, but Al Wheeler wasn't done yet. He enrolled at Iowa State University in Ames to study microbiology. By 22, Al had his master's degree, but the best was yet to come. Emma Watson Monteith was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to Henry and Rachel Monteith in 1915. Although born the same year, Emma and Al's upbringing couldn't have been more different. The Monteiths were very active in the civil rights struggle. Emma's mother, Rachel, was a teacher and founder of a school. Father Henry was a master mason, building structures that still stud the streets of Columbia. Emma's older sister, Madjeska Monteith Simkins, helped make the family homestead famous through her activities as an iconic civil rights and academic leader. Growing up in a family of eight meant Emma always had a buddy to play with. One day, from the rumble seat of a car, Emma and her 9-year-old sister, Rebecca, watched in horror as a White mob lynched a Black man. They witnessed a pregnant Black woman being slashed to death and then strung up. As scarring as seeing the murders would be it helped fuel Emma's lifelong crusade for social justice.
• [00:04:27] MARY MCDADE WHEELER: Well, she and her sister had seen a lynching in South Carolina when they were children, and they had made a pact that they would not ever let anything stand in the way of trying to make sure that that kind of thing stopped happening in this country.
• [00:04:45] NANCY WHEELER: My mother had finished college. She had taught school for a year or two, and then one of her older sisters died, and she left an insurance policy to my mother, and my mother decided that she was going to use that insurance policy to come north and go to public health school, and they met and they fell in love, I guess.
• [00:05:11] NARRATOR: Marrying the same year they graduated from U of M, Al and Emma moved out of state to begin their new lives.
• [00:05:18] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: We both got master's degrees in 1938, and then I went down to Howard University in Washington, DC, as a medical technologist, and I worked for the medical school in the medical school for Freedmen's Hospital. I spent two years there, and then I came back.
• [00:05:37] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: My mother lived in South Carolina because they decided it was too expensive for him to have an apartment.
• [00:05:45] NARRATOR: Wanting to live close to family, Emma set up housekeeping in Columbia, South Carolina. It was a happy, hectic time with three children under 5 years old. Then the unthinkable happened.
• [00:05:57] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: My twin sister was playing with matches one day and set her dress on fire. By the time mom was able to help her, it was too late and the ambulance that came to take her to a hospital said, "We can't do that because she's Black," and left her to die in my mom's arms.
• [00:06:25] NANCY WHEELER: She said "I have to get out of this. I can't keep on with being concerned about one daughter. I've got two more." So she did.
• [00:06:42] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: My father stayed at Howard for a while. He came down, of course, because of the baby's death. Then he came back about two or three months later. He said to my mother, "I'm going to Ann Arbor. If you want to come, pack your bag and let's go. Otherwise, I'm going without you." She said to me, "I never moved so fast in my whole life." And she packed a bag, and she grabbed her kids, and they came to Ann Arbor.
• [00:07:22] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: My wife and I decided about 1944 that we might like to live in Ann Arbor. Conditions, in terms of discrimination, segregation were pretty bad, and we decided that if we stayed, we were going to try to change it. I'd been very active in the civil rights struggle, particularly since 1950. There were sections of town that you just couldn't borrow money to move into, and we moved into a section of town on the west side, and there were no Blacks there, and we had half of the money that we needed to buy the house, but we couldn't borrow the other half.
• [00:07:59] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: When we moved into the house, he sent us all back to South Carolina with my mother to be safe in South Carolina, of all things. He stayed there at the house in Ann Arbor, and to just watch what happened.
• [00:08:19] NARRATOR: Their fight for fair housing didn't end there. Rooting out redlining was a cornerstone in Al and Emma's agenda.
• [00:08:27] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: We were restricted to where we could live, where you could buy or rent. We decided we were going to try to open up the housing in the community.
• [00:08:43] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: The NAACP put together a fair housing law, and we went to the city with it, and they would not deal with it. We listed the support of the clergy in the community and the Black and White clergy, but mostly the White clergy. They would come down and what we did, we picketed in front of City Hall every council meeting night for almost two years. To get that fair housing law through. A chapter of CORE was here at the time, and they took the mayor and a couple of council people on bus rides around town and let them see the rotten housing, and they put together a march out at the city limits downtown to City Hall. Between the picketing every night and the CORE activities and the work of the clergyman, we passed, what was the first fair housing law in the state of Michigan.
• [00:09:51] NARRATOR: Al counted the formation of the Ann Arbor chapter of the NAACP among his first victories.
• [00:09:58] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: We got a group going called the Ann Arbor Civic Forum in 1950. We sat down and debated what we were going to do. That was just about 20-25 Black folks. We ultimately decided that we were going to tackle housing and education, employment, and police malpractices, and so forth. From that, we began to bring people into action. I think what was considered the most desirable jobs was as a domestic butler, cook or whatnot, at the president of the university's home, at some of the fraternities and sororities and whatnot. The terrible thing about that, from my perspective, was that the parents were really training their kids to see them in these jobs. That was the kind of despair and hopelessness that I saw in the community. We decided, the Civic Forum began to set that tone. I'm very grateful to a lady who died a few years ago, Mrs. Rumsey, who was acting in a number of organizations in the community and at Bethel AME Church. She said, "Young man, I'll take you to some of these groups. Sounds like you mean business." She opened up the community to me. I had a little entrée because we had a softball league in the city, and we had an all-Black team in there. I played the third base for them.
• [00:11:55] INTERVIEWER: Were you good?
• [00:11:57] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: I was pretty good on the field. He finally got an NAACP chapter organized. There'd been some opposition to it amongst Whites and Blacks in the community for getting going. There had been a couple of efforts in the past. The state of Michigan rewrote its Constitution. I think it was 1960. Our local chapter decided we had a taste of success in Ann Arbor, but it was important that it be done throughout the state. I was asked to put together a proposal and to take it to the Constitutional Convention. Well, I was not a delegate to the convention, so I had no credentials to get it into the convention. I couldn't get enough signatures to get it introduced into the Constitutional Convention. I took it over to Governor John Swainson's office, and he wasn't in. I put it on his desk with a note: "If you think it's worthwhile, would you get the signatures we need. If you don't think it's worthwhile, put it in the waste basket." Next few days I knew it was introduced with a number of signatures. Out of that has come what is now the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, and it serves the whole state, and it serves all people. It serves Black people. It serves handicapped people. Its work touches most of us in this state after a lot of harassing and hell raising, we finally got the schools to hire a Black teacher. We got more people interested and involved and participating.
• [00:13:30] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: Started a youth group with the NAACP giving the same messages of opportunity if you make the best of your education. The same caution that you will have to be better, smarter, and more diligent in how you present yourself in order to be successful because of people's ingrained attitudes.
• [00:14:04] OMER JEAN DIXON WINBORN: We would tell Dr. Wheeler things that were going on in high school. We could complain to him, and my mom watched him and trusted him to guide us through whatever was going on. He was very significant as a leader in our community. He says, "I have an idea and I want you to go talk to your parents. But I'm going to have a reporter from the Ann Arbor News. I want you to talk to him, and I want you to tell him exactly what's going on."
• [00:14:35] NARRATOR: Taking a multi-pronged approach, the Wheelers set their sights on knocking down segregated housing, schools, employment, and police mistreatment.
• [00:14:45] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: He worked for the university. People talked about how he was the first Black instructor and the first Black professor at the university. But he was always active in civil rights. There came a point where the university decided that he was an embarrassment to them because of the civil rights activities, and so they told him that he wouldn't get any promotions or raises as long as he continued doing the civil rights activities, and he came home, and he talked to Mom about it. She started planting this big garden. She dug up the whole backyard and planted a garden, and she raised chickens in the garage until the city came and told her that she couldn't. She sewed everything that we wore because she was not going to let our needs and their needs stand in the way of the continuation of the civil rights activities. He recognized, fairly early on that if the civil rights movement was going to make any real progress, it was going to have to align itself with other organizations. He aligned himself fairly early also with the Democratic Party, recognizing that there wasn't a way to make the changes that he wanted to make without cooperation from some of the other organizations.
• [00:16:23] LANA POLLACK: I was an officer in the local, the Ann Arbor Democratic Party. We felt that in Al Wheeler, we had somebody who would be convincing to a public who is not used to voting for Democrats. We were right, but it was close.
• [00:16:40] MARY WHEELER MCDADE: I was upset when he decided to run for mayor. The whole family had been in Peoria for Christmas, and he had a heart attack while he was there. The first thing I heard when he got back home was that he was going to run for mayor. I kept saying, "You don't need this political stuff," but he insisted. Then it was all fraught the entire time he was mayor.
• [00:17:06] NARRATOR: In 1975, Ann Arbor was the first US city to use preferential voting to elect a mayor. Dr. Al Wheeler beat incumbent Mayor Jim Stephenson by a slim margin of 121 votes. Lawsuits trying to rule preferential voting unconstitutional failed but efforts to have the city stop using the measure in the future worked.
• [00:17:29] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: The preferential vote in Ann Arbor was for that one election that he won, and he won because the minor party didn't reach the number of votes they needed to actually be counted. Their second choice votes were counted in that election, and Dad won with the second choice votes.
• [00:17:52] DR. ALBERT WHEELER: One of my opponents was Jim Stephenson and got somewhere over 90%. That was sufficient to give me a victory. On the second time on the re-election, my opponent was Louis Belcher, who subsequently became the mayor, and he served six or seven years, something of that sort. But in that one, I won that election by one vote. I think the importance of that is to point out to people that one vote is important. When people say, "Well, my vote won't count," you never know.
• [00:18:35] NARRATOR: In 1977, Mayor Wheeler's one-vote victory over council member Louis Belcher made national headlines. Discovering that 29 residents had cast ineligible ballots, county Republicans filed suit. Thinking he could determine how ineligible votes changed the election, a judge ordered electors to reveal their vote. One woman refused. The constitutionality question of the judge's order made it all the way to the State Supreme Court, placing Ann Arbor in the national news once again. Finally, in an out of court settlement, Mayor Wheeler and council member Belcher agreed to a special election. It was held in 1978. Louis Belcher won the election by 282 votes.
• [00:19:20] ALMA WHEELER SMITH: People forget because of Daddy's advocacy and politics, is that he was also a scientist.
• [00:19:28] CONAN SMITH: I had asked him when I was a kid to come speak to my class about being mayor. He was disinterested in that. But he would be happy to talk about being microbiologist.
• [00:19:38] LAURIE MCCAULEY: I have a bias that I think scientists make great leaders. I think part of the reason why is that science is committed to generating new knowledge and to carving out new pathways that didn't exist. This is another thing that is just really impressive about Dr. Wheeler. He had these other really commitments to reaching out and supporting individuals in the community and reaching out, and supporting high school students to see a pathway to college. You just think about the myriad of responsibilities in those roles, and it's really impressive.
• [00:20:18] CONAN SMITH: Dear friend of ours, Bunyan Bryant, passed away recently. He was a professor at the School of Natural Resources here that Grandpa had recruited to come to Michigan. I tell this story about how it wasn't just about him, it was about creating systems and culture and making change that would last.
• [00:20:45] NARRATOR: In the 60s, Dr. Wheeler was asked to create a program to help prepare under-served students to succeed at the University of Michigan.
• [00:20:53] LINH SONG: I learned about Mayor Wheeler when I campaigned, and then I committed to desegregating our community as it is now. That was part of my campaign work, and it's been some of my work in City Council. The first Black mayor in a city that actually had a strong Black population, tells me that we can do it again.
• [00:21:17] YODIT MESFIN JOHNSON: Based on what I know of Dr. Wheeler, that he had an ability to help people to understand that our fates are inextricably tied.
• [00:21:29] LANA POLLACK: I think one of his greatest achievements is just being who he was and presenting himself as a man with intelligence and dignity and integrity. He was a role model. He was a role model, to me, and so many others. That was an Al Wheeler lesson. Wasn't microbiology, but it was human relations.
• [00:21:59] MATTHEW MCDADE: One thing I share a lot is that our grandmother had a college education, and back in that time, a lot of kids weren't even getting a high school education.
• [00:22:13] TARA SMITH: I think fair fairness and equality, too, in a lot of different ways. It's not just along racial lines, but also economic lines. It's things like that that are a legacy that they started, that they taught their kids and they've all taught us. Doesn't mean we're perfect.
• [00:22:31] CONAN SMITH: As iconic as they were, either through Mom and Aunt Mary and Aunt Nancy, we'd hear about their shortcomings and foibles. But also they were not--they didn't hold themselves above those mistakes. They were happy to help us learn from them, as well.
• [00:22:55] YODIT MESFIN JOHNSON: Every time I drive past Wheeler Park now in Ann Arbor, I think about him but I also think about the fact that that park didn't become a realization until many of the Black people in that community who had organized for a better community no longer live there. It's a stark and humbling reminder that much of what we're doing, we are doing for our children's grandchildren.