The French Dukes: Rhythm, Roots, and Legacy

Mon, 12/09/2024 - 2:13pm

When: 2024

Filmmaker Frederic M. Culpepper tells the story of Ann Arbor's legendary drill team, The French Dukes.  Told through the memories of members and those who watched in awe, the rise of the Dukes from an idea to an internationally-known team is accompanied by photographs and articles from the time.

Transcript

• [00:00:23] LARRY YOUNG JR.: I get so many different stories. Now, I heard it started actually on the street that my dad grew up, the house that I'm actually in right now because I took care of my grandmother and I inherited the house, and they said it started a couple of doors up the street from me on Beakes Street, like one of them shared today, that they went to a drill performance and seen them, and then they came home and they wanted to start it.
• [00:00:55] MICHAEL BRIDGES: They got started from Teddy Murray and Roy Campbell. Teddy Murray's mother belonged to the Elks and also her husband.
• [00:01:06] CALVIN ROSS: My aunt, Letrice White, she was a member of the Elks, and she won the Beauty Queen for that year.
• [00:01:20] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Because they belonged to the Elks, the Elks were always in some parades and they'd have on their little uniforms, and she would always take her sons with them. Roy Campbell was just a friend of Teddy Murray, so they really enjoyed it. There's a parade that used to go across the bridge in Detroit called the Emancipation Parade. It was really long.
• [00:01:43] CALVIN ROSS: In Windsor, they had every year in August, the Emancipation. The Elks had their convention over there in Windsor, Canada. Her son, Ted Murray, and his best friend, Roy Campbell, they go with her and in the parade, they had a drill team, and Ted and Roy were so, "Wow, man."
• [00:02:18] MICHAEL BRIDGES: He saw that a drill team in there and said, he'd like to do it, and she said, ''Well, why don't you go back? When you get back to Ann Arbor, get some of your friends together and you guys do it. ''
• [00:02:27] CALVIN ROSS: They said, "When we get back home, we're going get our fellows together, and we going make us a drill team, too."
• [00:02:33] MICHAEL BRIDGES: He says, "Okay." He went home and got some of his friends together and said, "Let's try to do this." They actually started out in Teddy Murray's basement. When the days got better, they'd go outside and do it. Then the mother said, ''Well, if you guys are going to do this and be serious, you need support. '' That's when she talked to the people at the Elks and got them to join up the Elks to support them.
• [00:02:59] LARRY YOUNG JR.: A guy named Bojack, Billy Drumright, he was fresh out of the army, and he saw the kids out here trying to learn how to step, and so he taught them how to do it properly, and that boy, once he done that, that was it, them boys, they was rocking the house. Never stopped. I started in the French Dukes when I was about 12, 13, 14. I was young. Actually, my family has a history with the French Dukes. Calvin Ross was one of the commanders of the French Dukes when I was a kid, watching them grow up and then I found out that Tommy Jury, my other cousin was a part of the French Dukes. I guess it's in the blood.
• [00:03:50] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Lifelong members since I was about 13. My cousin, he was a French Duke. He was like my older brother. My father's sister, they stayed downstairs, we stayed upstairs, so he was like my brother, and I would watch him do it, so he would take me along with him and teach me steps, and I got involved in it from there.
• [00:04:12] CARL JAMES JOHNSON: Probably it was in '61 or '62, I never really remember dates. But I was going to these stepping shows for the University of Michigan. Sororities and fraternities would put on these stepping shows, and I was really intrigued by that, and I went by Jones School, and they were out there marching. It was just the same thing, but it was more Black, soulful, it made you feel proud when you're seeing them marching, so that's why I joined the French Dukes.
• [00:04:48] JIMMY YATES: They were big time in Ann Arbor, through like the various competitions, the parades, just the name. Like I said, we weren't any, I don't want to say gang, but it was just a camaraderie of something you aspired to, a young Black man in the '60s and '70s didn't have really a whole lot going for us. We could sell drugs, get into fights, break windows, stuff like that. But this was a higher calling. You couldn't do any of that while you were a Duke.
• [00:05:32] LARRY YOUNG JR.: Once you became a French Duke, we had respect for one another, and we always honored that unity of a French Duke. I know like when I'm walking the streets, if they see me in uniform or they see some of those who I didn't know that was part of the French Dukes early on, when they found out that I was a part of the French Dukes, we were brothers.
• [00:06:04] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Uniform was a brown khaki that we used most of the time. We had blue letters and blue caps, and then sometimes, we had red letters and red caps.
• [00:06:15] JIMMY YATES: We had olive green, red tams, blue tams, white tams. The aiguillettes were yellow, white, blue, red.
• [00:06:25] MICHAEL BRIDGES: That did make us feel good that we could wear our uniforms, because there was a lot of guys, playing sports that got to wear their letter sweaters and stuff, and us that didn't have that we could wear our uniforms and say, we're into something. We're the French Dukes.
• [00:06:39] JIMMY YATES: They had to have fundraisers for those who couldn't afford it, washing cars, bake sales, any other fundraiser to get the money to buy everybody the uniform.
• [00:06:57] CALVIN ROSS: I remember the first time I put my uniform on I had to walk maybe 10 blocks to get up to the market. I had to walk through the neighborhood and early in the morning there's little kids out in front of their house playing. They see me coming down the street and they would run up to it. "Oh, you're a French Duke, you're a French Duke." Oh, man, and they would follow me, and I said, "Y'all better go on back home. You can't follow me where I'm going." "Oh, We're y'all going to drill at? Where.." You know?
• [00:07:34] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Then they started drilling up at practicing up at the Elks, but it was dirt up there, not a asphalt driveway yet. They got tired of the dirt. That's when they moved down to Jones School.
• [00:07:49] LARRY YOUNG JR.: That was scary, because when I used to go to practice to watch them, they didn't play. When the commander said fall in, no play. There was no play. Everybody got serious, and we drilled. I mean, we drilled sun up, sun down. We practiced, we practiced it. Then a couple of us got together and formulated new steps. We try to always incorporate new stuff and the commander, Calvin Ross was the commander at the time, and he might have been a little short guy, but dang he was the meanest dude I know. He didn't play. That's something when he say practice at this time. Well, you better have a a good reason you didn't come to practice on time.
• [00:08:39] MICHAEL BRIDGES: They were intense. They were really intense because we always had an audience, and people would be watching us, so nobody wanted to mess up. At the end of every practice, in our session, we'd have elimination. If somebody missed a step or did something a little bit wrong, they had to step out of line. The next person had to step up to that position because each position did different steps, we had to learn everybody's position that was in there.
• [00:09:12] LARRY YOUNG JR.: That first day, not knowing my left from my right. That was the first thing, knowing your left from your right. I remember they like, "boy, you can't do your left and right," so they put a rock in your hand. That's your left. The one without is your right. [LAUGHTER] Sometimes you know it, but you get so confused because you want to fit in. Your mind is just jumbled. You're like, you just you just showed me a step, and I'm trying to remember the step. Now you're telling me my left and my right and I've gone and forgot what my left and right is. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:09:48] CARL JAMES JOHNSON: Practicing with the drill team, it was intense because they really wanted you to make sure that you were right on point if you made a quarter of a turn and you're supposed to make a full turn they will let you know. "You got to shape up." But it was a good discipline. It was a good way to keep your mind active into what you were doing, you had to focus.
• [00:10:13] JIMMY YATES: When you're in rank, when you're in formation, you look straight ahead. All you can see is the back of the person in front of you's head. You can't worry about what's going on over there. You had to know your step. If you messed up, everybody in the crowd in the parade route could see it. You had to be sharp. You had to be on point.
• [00:10:38] LARRY YOUNG JR.: They were mean. Of course, back in the day, it wasn't like today, you can't talk to my kid like that. Well, French Dukes, they talk to you like you was in the military. They talked about your mama, talked about your daddy, and there you say something or do something about it, and everybody had that. It was like being in the military and you did not want to mess up. That was one thing once they allowed me to be a part of the drill team, man, I practiced because I did not want to be out of step.
• [00:11:09] JIMMY YATES: You never got to a parade, a competition unless you knew the steps. We had, I think, about 30 steps, and you had to know them. You had to know not only in the role you were in, you had to know all four rows, because you never know who was going to show up or who wasn't going to show up. You had to learn each row's steps.
• [00:11:36] MICHAEL BRIDGES: It was a job. It was an experience for a young man to get into, but we enjoyed it because we were all friends out there. It was just an enlightening experience to be doing stuff with your friends.
• [00:11:48] CALVIN ROSS: Put that uniform on and walk through any Black neighborhood, and you would get recognized. They know who you were.
• [00:11:56] WILLIAM J. THOMSON III: I know about the French Dukes because I could have been one of them, except I liked baseball a little bit more than drilling. Those people who were not a Duke, but who were some of the brothers who we grew up with, we would go back to the Farmers' Market when they were drilling. We would definitely stop and try to pick up some of the moves. I still remember "KJ special." As far as I'm concerned, that's the French Dukes are one of the proudest groups that ever came out of Ann Arbor, the state of Michigan. The nation, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of precision and drilling.
• [00:12:36] SHARON GILLESPIE: When they used to practice down at the Farmers Market, they had an audience every day. Everybody went down to see the French Dukes, I mean it was like a party.
• [00:12:48] JIMMY YATES: It wasn't only the guys in the group. It was the whole community that we had something bigger than ourselves.
• [00:13:00] LARRY YOUNG JR.: I was friends with kind of people. I had a lot of white friends. One of my friends that I grew up with, her mother came to me one day, and this was around Halloween. She wanted to be a French Duke. She wanted to dress up for Halloween as a French Duke. She asked me, would I help her get the uniform to be a French Duke? She wanted to be a French Duke, because when she seen, she was so impressed, and she asked me, would I help her. I was impressed, because I was like what? This white lady want to be like us? That really blew me away, because I was friends with her daughter. Here's her mama coming there. Her mom wanted to talk to me, and I was scared. I didn't do nothing. I didn't mess with that girl. When her mother told me that she wanted to be a French Dukes I was like, wow.
• [00:13:57] KEN MAGEE: Well, I was born and raised in Ann Arbor. I was a product of the Ann Arbor Public School System. I went to Angell, Tappan, and then Huron. But when I was a kid at Angell School in the late '60s and early '70s, we would ride our bikes all around town. We would get up morning, wouldn't get home until it was dark outside. We'd go, whether it be the Farmers' Market, run around the diag, go to the different parks, go down, play ball, do whatever we had to do. One time we ran into this group of people at the Farmers' Market. They were the French Dukes. Obviously, they were different than us. They were dressed differently than us. They were doing these marching drills, and we just thought they were awesome. This group of Black kids impressed this group of white kids so much. We sat back and when we went back to our neighborhoods, we pretended we were the French Dukes. We tried to do the steps. I even called a friend of mine today saying, I'm going down to see the French Dukes presentation, but I didn't tell him that in the beginning. What I told him was, I said, "I want you to hear something that I'm going to say to you, Donnie, and I want you to tell me what I'm thinking. I went, [NOISE]"
• [00:15:11] KEN MAGEE: He said, "French Dukes"?
• [00:15:14] SHARON GILLESPIE: I think it did a lot for the Black community, pride wise, here we are. We're Black and we're proud. We had something to brag on.
• [00:15:24] KEN MAGEE: If you were a French Duke, let's face it. You were cool. The French Dukes, they almost had a mystique about them that you knew they were good kids and you weren't going to have a problem back and forth, whereas if you ran into people who were French Dukes, you looked up to them, almost like a star athlete in a high school or something of that nature, you really thought that they were neat. They had an impact on the little kids in the neighborhoods, all the neighborhoods. Whether the Black neighborhoods or the white neighborhoods or the rich or the poor, it didn't matter because they were seen all over the place.
• [00:15:58] MICHAEL BRIDGES: We enjoy when people would want to say, "we want to see every step you do." That's when we really put on a show.
• [00:16:06] SHARON GILLESPIE: It's when they first come on the stage, doing that little double. That was it. Everybody would start yelling and cheering. [LAUGHTER] That was it when they first come on and they had this little step they would do coming in, and that was it.
• [00:16:21] MICHAEL BRIDGES: We even had a step when we said "double time," and then we say, "double stomp," and we hit it even harder, I think I've developed bad feet because of that.
• [00:16:32] CARL JAMES JOHNSON: It was like, called an arrow step, double time, and we would go into a point where the flag person would be right in the middle and then we would go out and then we'd all go down at the same time.
• [00:16:43] MICHAEL BRIDGES: I just remember some of the kids hollering out "FDs. Are they the fire department or what?" We wanted to tell them that "No, we're the French Dukes."
• [00:16:52] KEN MAGEE: Then we saw him at Crisler Arena because we used to go to all the Michigan basketball games. It was a 50-cent ticket. Kids could get in. We probably snuck in at the time. Then we saw them perform there. The French Dukes, watching them as a young man, as a young kid growing up in Ann Arbor was pretty neat.
• [00:17:12] SHARON GILLESPIE: Well, they had such a large following. Yes, the younger girls, they were after the Dukes, and the Dukes took advantage of it. I would say it. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:17:25] LARRY YOUNG JR.: It was like a crowd of people hovering and following the bus, waiting for the bus to stop for us to get off and when I got off the bus, they was all out there chatting and raving about us. I had two girls fighting over me, and I just like, I got two arms. Come on. Let's go.
• [00:17:42] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Their actual first performance was in a parade, and he wasn't sure, but he thinks it was, like, a 4th of July parade in Ypsilanti because we used to do that every year. That's something I did two or three times. Then their next performance after the parade, they said they were drilling. They got uniforms, and that's when other guys when they seen them practicing in uniforms, mainly a lot of their other friends wanted to join in and be a part of it. That's when they got really big, where almost all the young men of that age group in Ann Arbor was a French Duke.
• [00:18:18] JIMMY YATES: I was in one of the Canada emancipation parades also. One thing I learned is, you can't be nervous. You couldn't worry about the crowd. Who was watching, stuff like that.
• [00:18:36] LARRY YOUNG JR.: That first time I was in uniform in Canada and hearing how they feared us, yes, we're going to get these guys.
• [00:18:46] CARL JAMES JOHNSON: Crowds were quite crowded and a lot of these events, especially when we went to Boston. The streets were just crowded. They put on a demonstration show at this auditorium with other drill teams from the Elks. I just remember that. We came in first place.
• [00:19:10] MICHAEL BRIDGES: We performed at our junior high school talent show at Slauson Junior High School. I had got miscued, our commander had us in one uniform, and back then, we didn't have cell phones and all this other stuff. I came in a different uniform than everybody else. They were in the khakis and I was in a black outfit and everybody was wondering what was special about me. [LAUGHTER] Actually, our commander got mad and said, I shouldn't let you drill, but he knew I was a front-line top driller, and he couldn't eliminate me. But I went on and performed, and people kept asking and I said, it was just a mistake. That was it.
• [00:19:56] JIMMY YATES: When we showed up for competitions, most of the other drill teams wouldn't even show up. No, French Dukes, they're here. We've already lost.
• [00:20:06] LARRY YOUNG JR.: First time I went to a competition, and Colonel Nicholson got on the bus, and he said, well, I got good news and I got bad news. Which one you all want to hear first? Of course, we want to hear the good news. But we just said, bring it to us. He said, well, the bad news is several drill teams when they heard that the French Dukes was back, they left. They said "we can't compete with them. We pack it up." But the good news was that they allow us to be in the competition. Of course, when we done, took first place again.
• [00:20:41] MICHAEL BRIDGES: We got invited to the Ed Sullivan show. I don't know how that came about. I really don't. Nobody's ever told me or we found out, but someone must have got to them because that was when the Beatles was coming in, the Temptations, the Supremes on the show. But we were asked to come to perform on the show. We didn't have the money to get there. We tried to get it. He was willing to have us there, but he didn't want to pay for us to get there.
• [00:21:07] LARRY YOUNG JR.: When we did travel, it was always the people in the community that poured into the kids. That's how we travel. That's how we done a lot of things. The Elks was just that branding that helped us go to different events. But when it really came to support monetarily, "no, we don't want to spend no money. You guys good. Yes, but we ain't spending no money. We ain't got the money like that. Good job, buddies." We used to give parties and car washes and different events, and we always came up with enough money to travel.
• [00:21:46] SHARON GILLESPIE: At one point in history, they even marched in, Nixon, I think it was President Nixon's parade.
• [00:21:55] MICHAEL BRIDGES: Somewhere along the line because we were a Black group of kids in Ann Arbor, and Ann Arbor is a liberated town that we got investigated by the FBI. J. Egar Hoover and, I guess, President Nixon wanted to know what's going on because at the time, the Black Panthers were out and about, too. They wanted to know if we were a Black group, a gang trying to get together. When it was told back to them that, we performed and we were really good, that's when Nixon invited us to be in his inaugurational parade.
• [00:22:30] SHARON GILLESPIE: They made the town proud. They were proud, and they made us proud.
• [00:22:35] WILLIAM J. THOMSON III: That was a moment I was very proud to be an Ann Arborite a Black Ann Arborite, and a Black male Ann Arborite because they did us proud.
• [00:22:48] MICHAEL BRIDGES: We did a reunion in 2012. We were interviewed by Channel 7 News WXYZ.
• [00:22:57] WXYZ REPORTER: [BACKGROUND] From their berets to their bootstraps, the French Dukes still got it. Yes, they're a few decades older, but check out their military precision and dynamic moves. We caught up with them practicing at the Ann Arbor Farmers' Market.
• [00:23:21] MICHAEL BRIDGES: That was a reunion that we did. It was exciting because a lot of people I went to high school with on Facebook and stuff, they were telling people the French Dukes are getting back together, and they were coming in to see us again.
• [00:23:33] LARRY YOUNG JR.: It was such a good time for us. A lot of times it got back. They felt like they could drill again. I'm like, dude, let's get these young kids, man. They got stronger legs than we do. They got better lungs than we do. But that feeling never leaves. When we got back together from that old reunion because I remember trying to get them together. They always talking about, no, man, we ain't trailing. I'm too old, man. But when they got back in rank and saw that they could do it, they forgot all about the kids. They were ready to drill again. I'm like, dude.
• [00:24:07] MICHAEL BRIDGES: The mayor of Ann Arbor at that time, he was in my class at Slauson Junior High School and high school, and he came and gave us a proclamation at one of our drill meets. We only supposed to drill one time, but we ended up drilling, like, I think it was seven times because people kept asking, we want to see you again. Let's do this and let's do that. He gave us a proclamation, and he said, if I get elected again, will you guys come and drill in 4 July parade for us? We said, yes, sure. I remember coming down when we first hit Main Street, we came around the corner, and I could hear some of the older people, "French Dukes here they are," I got real excited again, but some of them were older and it was hard to do every step at that time by that time because we were at different age then.
• [00:25:00] JIMMY YATES: Larry Young is trying to continue with another group. Someone was saying French Dukes 2.0.
• [00:25:08] LARRY YOUNG JR.: No, I am actually running a youth group called Salt of the Earth, and I've been teaching them the things that I've learned from the French Dukes. I've been trying to incorporate the youth into a program to get them off the streets, something that kept me off the streets. God blessed me to be a blessing to them so that they can have something to look forward to. I would love to have a program where even when I'm dead and gone that my grandkids, my great-grandkids, can be a part of and be able to grow from because it sure taught me how to be a better person.
• [00:25:53] MICHAEL BRIDGES: It makes you feel good that you created something and people are watching you and you put a smile on their faces.
• [00:25:59] JIMMY YATES: Ultimately proud. That's why I still wear it to this very day. It can be sitting up in the closet, but when even sitting in the closet, when I see it, yes, I'm a Duke. [LAUGHTER]