Shortly before he passed away, Gregory Glenn asked relatives to spread the ashes from his cremation in two specific places: Belle Isle and South Africa.
And that was just like him. He lived life both as a local kid still tied to Detroit and as a man of the world with vision beyond his city and his nation.
Glenn died of a heart attack at age 73 on June 10 in Cambridge, Mass. His memorial Mass was last Tuesday in the historic Sacred Heart Catholic Church, a 19th-century landmark building and Detroit’s most prominent parish for African American Catholics.
Greg was a dear friend, a school friend, my first close Black friend, a guy who enlightened me years ago and did it again last week, too, by drawing me into his church. Even in death, he helped acquaint me with Detroit’s African American culture. You might say he “woke” me again in death.
Yes, it is a common trope bordering on cliché to portray a white kid and a Black kid bonding over music and sports. But those true memories filled my mind in the pew at Sacred Heart, remembering the 1960s at St. Martin of Tours parish in the Jefferson-Chalmers neighborhood in Detroit’s southeast corner.
Our parish was about six miles east of downtown, next to Grosse Pointe Park but of a much different culture than our upscale neighbor. St. Martin's — on one block — supported a church, a grade school, a high school, a convent and a rectory. The schools have long been torn down. The church still stands but has been vacant for decades.
Sacred Heart was Greg’s previous church. It was built by German immigrants in 1875 and is on the National Register of Historic Places.
It is also one of few structures remaining from the “Paradise Valley” era in the first half of the 20thcentury when many of Detroit’s African-Americans lived in Black Bottom and around the extended entertainment and commercial district north of it along Hastings Street.
After the Germans left the neighborhood, a Black congregation moved to this building from a smaller church nearby.
“On Sept. 1, 1938,” according to the church web site, “the parishioners moved in procession up Eliot, across Hastings to Rivard and became Sacred Heart Parish.”
Hastings Street, of course, got replaced by the Chrysler Freeway, but the church remains standing sturdily just south of Mack Ave., on the north end of Eastern Market, without homes and families around it anymore.
Before those buildings were torn down for “urban renewal,” several generations of Glenns lived in this neighborhood, Greg’s daughter, Janen Glenn, told me. Like many former parishioners, Gregory frequently returned.
His last visit, she said, came late last winter for the funeral of Father Norman Thomas, a legendary pastor of Lebanese descent who took over Sacred Heart shortly after the Riot/Rebellion of 1967 and turned it into something special.
“Sacred Heart is not a regular parish,” said John Thorne, a pastoral associate who sang beautifully at the memorial Mass. “Only 2 percent of our parishioners come from our ZIP code.”
Instead, he said, they come from places like Holly, Lansing or Canada.
“People come back,” Thorne said, “and they say, `Hey, it’s home.’”
Among them is Dr. Isaiah (Ike) McKinnon, the former Detroit police chief who holds a doctorate in educational administration among several degrees. He grew up nearby, he said, at 4125 St. Antoine, where most needs of life could be met in a short walk around Hastings.
“Countless businesses,” McKinnon said. “The Castle Theatre. Diggs Funeral Home. The Willis Theater. The New Bethel Church, where I first met Aretha Franklin. Brewster Center, where Joe Louis trained. Lincoln Elementary School. Joe’s Tap Room, a pool hall. Eastern Market. On Saturday mornings, a line of moms would walk there. And the Flame Show Bar! As kids, we’d walk by there and, from the sidewalk, you could hear James Brown.”
Greg Glenn also loved music, including James Brown. By most standards, he was a regular guy, an assembly-line worker who painted cars for GM for 25 years before retiring to Massachusetts, where he had attended college. He often came back home, sometimes for Detroit’s jazz festival.
At his Mass, along with traditional prayers, Thorne sang “Amazing Grace,” “I Won’t Complain,” “I Shall Wear a Crown,” “Psalm 23” and “God Has Smiled on Me.”
His tenor gave me goose bumps and flashed me back to the day in late 1967 when the soul singer Otis Redding died in a plane crash. Greg and I were in 11th grade. Greg cried that day and he was not a crier.
A tall, handsome, strong athlete, his nickname was “Glee-Glee” and his default setting was a smile. More than a year older than me, Greg was sort of a big brother figure.
His family had moved into our neighborhood as integration grudgingly spread across the East Side, and Greg was one of the few Black kids in our school. Greg possessed the self-confidence of the talented athlete and he showed me some of the ropes of downtown. We used to take the Jefferson bus to Cobo Arena to watch the Pistons in Dave Bing’s early years.
A natural-born hustler, he knew every usher at Cobo, including the ones guarding doors as well as those at the entrance to the season-ticket holder lounge with the free hot dogs. We never went hungry at Pistons games.
We rarely discussed race relations in any blunt way, but Greg knew I liked to read, so he would loan me books like Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown and The Autobiography of Malcom X.
And, when I bought the Muhammad Speaks newspaper downtown and brought it to school, Glenn would patiently answer my ignorant questions about a different religion.
Less than four months after Redding died, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis.
This was spring of junior year, and it threatened musical plans I had made with Greg. Less than two weeks after Dr. King’s death, we were supposed to go to Cobo on Easter Monday to see a James Brown concert. (The King of Soul had moved up in the world from the Flame Show Bar).
The Rebellion had occurred just nine months before. Some of my friends suggested that a James Brown show downtown at this time might not be a good idea for a guy who looked like me. As you might have predicted by now, Greg Glenn would not entertain that thought.
“We’re going,” he told me. We took the DSR bus (a quarter, then), and he talked us through the Cobo doors that night and into the balcony. This was the first concert I’d ever attended. Hundreds of shows later, it’s still among the best I’ve ever seen and heard. James Brown in his prime. Good God!
I vividly remember that night. In the style of the time, the men in the audience wore Easter suits in bright hues of blue, yellow, green and other colors so that Cobo that night looked like a giant basket of Easter eggs. And Brown out-dressed everyone. For me, it was both eye- and ear-opening.
But that’s all in the past. Greg’s dead now and so is “Father Norm,” who made it to age 92, refusing to retire from Sacred Heart until his passing forced the issue. And what might the future hold for a still-living church shepherded for 54 years by a hockey-playing priest who skated with a group called “the Flying Fathers”?
His act will be tough to follow; not every house of worship has a pulpit adorned with “Black Lives Matter” banner, a Black Jesus on the crucifix above the altar and a Black Jesus pictured on the side walls in the Stations of the Cross.
Presently, the Archdiocese of Detroit operates Sacred Heart as one of the five parishes in the “Detroit Lower Eastside Family” under the supervision of Msgr. Dan Trapp. But the future is not clear.
“We’re waiting for a pastor to get assigned,” said Thorne, the singer. “That will give us more clarity.”
“It is the mecca,” said McKinnon, the ex-cop, “for African-American Catholics in Detroit.”
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