Was Detroit Priest Murdered? Jazz Opera Tells the Story

By Bill Wylie-Kellermann

"Forgotten," a jazz musical about a pastor who was murdered at the Ford Rouge Plant in Detroit, will have its world premier at Marygrove College, March 5-7, 2004. I couldn’t be more pleased. This thing is full of history and heart. It will garner a huge viewing from the labor community here, but churchfolk — and Episcopalians in particular — should be attentive to this event among us.

One of five cousins, all pastors, Rev. Lewis Bradford, after the fashion of the worker-priests, went to work in the plant. As he wrote in his diary, the "real reason" for being in Detroit was that he should "make a guided approach toward meeting the spiritual need of Detroit. This should be done at present, through [my] work, not as an evangelist."

This was the 1930's and the Depression (capital D) was taking peoples lives on the streets of Detroit and the Hoovervilles down by its tracks. Bradford began a radio show, called the Forgotten Man’s Radio Hour, innovatively interviewing people about their lives and the times as they waited in the soup kitchen line on Howard Street. These were the very people, two decades prior, which The Witness had been conceived to serve.

Allen Brett, a social activist in Detroit was a close friend of Bradford’s and helped him with the show. Brett’s father-in-law was Bishop Charles D. Williams of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and family pastor to Henry and Clara Ford. Oddly, as the Episcopal Bishop of Michigan, Williams was known as the "Red Bishop," for his stance in favor of workers. Each in their own ways were friends of The Witness.

Bradford’s own story in this jazz opera, weaves through Detroit’s remarkable history: the Ford Hunger March, the sit-down strikes, the battle of the overpass, the company campaign of terror against the union organizing efforts, and the attempt to divide the workers racially — they all figure in. (In fact for this reason, an in interdisciplinary course at McAllister College, which will produce the play later in the semester, puts music majors and labor history students in the same class, even pairing them with UAW workers on the line).

And yet, practically in biblical fashion, the larger historical drama is inseparable from the deeply personal one. Over his sleeping daughter, Bradford sings, "How can I explain to you/ the work I am called to do?/ Healing wounds is my goal/ the world is crying out to be made whole/ You are a child, you need to dream/ You have not seen what I have seen/ We’ve got to change the world/ For me and for you/ And that’s the work I’m called to do." (On the deeply personal, it will acknowledge the reviewer’s bias to note that Steve Jones, the play’s author-composer, recently told me and my daughter, Lydia, that he wrote this song after sitting at our dining room table and hearing the story of a letter I wrote to her from a county jail while serving a two month bit for an anti-nuclear liturgical direct action back when she was three!)

In the musical, as push comes to shove in the plant, Lewis Bradford struggles with and faces his own vocation and the fullness of freedom demanded. "It’s about time/ About time to take a stand/ What more do you need? We’ve got to work hand in hand/ The time is now, the place is here/ It’s about time to break the cycle of fear."

This was a period when the auto companies were investing in what came to be the Axis powers. This was an early wave of corporate globalization. If Hitler had won the war, they would have come out impeccably Nazi. . . As she put it, "I will try to make Americans see their own share of the guilt. They are making large profits out of supplying the means of death and torture."

Muriel Lester, a founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and a socialist from England, figures into the story at a decisive point. This was a period when the auto companies were investing in what came to be the Axis powers. This was an early wave of corporate globalization. If Hitler had won the war, they would have come out impeccably Nazi. Lester led a series of meetings to which Bradford was drawn. She had just come from the Far East and was traveling the world to bring attention to the atrocities committed by the Japanese in the infamous Rape of Nanking in China. As she put it, "I will try to make Americans see their own share of the guilt. They are making large profits out of supplying the means of death and torture." She wanted to talk directly with Henry Ford — and Bradford spent a day trying, in the face of active hostility, to open the door. A week later, he was dead.

On November 27, 1937, Bradford was found fatally injured in an obscure and lonely part of the plant. The company insisted it was an industrial accident, a fall, so said the obituary and others kept silent. His wife and daughter were told not to ask questions and urged to leave town. And they did.

Here is where the story beneath the story comes into play. Where memory and silence meet. Sixty years later, Steve Jones, a jazz musician living in Washington, DC, and a relative of Lewis Bradford, encounters the unresolved contradiction, the nagging question filtering down in family history: Was he in fact murdered? And thus begins a personal and spiritual (and ultimately musical) journey of his own. Immersing himself in the Detroit labor history, locating Bradford’s lost journal in an attic, and above all getting hold of the autopsy report (thereby hangs no small tale of it’s own) from which a forensic pathologist in the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s office has confirmed, "This was no accident — this was a homicide that was never investigated. . . There’s no way in hell that he fell."

As the pieces of the story became backlit one at a time, Jones began processing them musically and before he new it the opera was emerging at the piano beneath his fingertips — in the chords and idiom of his own heart.

He tells a story of courage and struggle, but it is also a story, like the gospels, in which the Powers That Be are players and Jones is not afraid to name names. Henry Ford sings, as though right off the canvass of a Diego Rivera portrait. And Harry Bennett, Ford’s enforcer and heir apparent, utters his own dark song. Then there’s Father Coughlin, whose radio show foils the Forgotten Man’s Hour, and seems to presage the era of hate broadcasting.

In the end it is a story of recovered memory and even resurrection faith. The chorus invokes Joe Hill. "Don’t mourn. Organize," says he. And of Bradford: "We remember you/ We remember you/ What you gave/ What you’ve done/ Will not be Forgotten."

It is an act of memory which Episcopalians and their friends would do well to share. The nagging questions of our own history summon us. Not to mention the One in whom all martyrs are gathered and remembered.

For those within driving range of Detroit, Marygrove College Theater is located on West McNichols (at Wyoming) in Detroit, Mich. Performances are at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 5, and Saturday, March 6, and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, March 7. Tickets are $25 with group discounts available. For information, please call the Michigan Labor History Society, producer of the event, at 313-577-4003.

Bill Wylie-Kellermann is a program director for the Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE) in Chicago, Ill. He is also on the steering committee of Word and World: A People’s School. He lives in Detroit, Mich., with his partner, Jeanie (who served as editor of The Witness from 1989-98), and their daughters, Lydia and Lucy.