The Roxboroughs: One Of Detroit's Leading Families

By Ken Coleman/Special to Tell Us USA

DETROIT - The Roxboroughs, five generations of lawyers along with artists, entertainers, and socialites, dominated newspaper headlines and gossip columns during the 1930s and 1940s. Their professional achievement, at times historic, and their personal exploits, at times embarrassing, made them household names.

RACE MAN IN NOLA

Charles A. Roxborough II, an African American, moved his family to Detroit in 1899 from New Orleans, Louisiana where he had been active in Republican Party politics. In fact, he fled New Orleans during a period of white backlash exhibited by regressive and racist Jim Crow laws and codes against political and economic gains earned by blacks after the Civil War. He bolted from the Republican Executive Committee after backing Democrat Edward J. Gay rather than Republican J.S. Davidson for Congress and encouraged other Louisiana blacks to follow suit.

He accused the national Republican Party of having conferred suffrage and civil rights on blacks only to maintain the party’s political majority, of deliberately defeating passage of the “Blair Educational Bill,” of the passage of the “McKinley Tariff Bill” to punish Southern blacks supported by sugar cane cultivation, and of refusing to seat contested black candidates from Louisiana, among other things.

Detroit historian Fred Hart Williams described the bearded Roxborough as an “independent, astute man who left his mark, his legal ability is stamped indelibly upon the legal profession in two states.”

“They came to Detroit for the children’s sake, cause my grandfather was so proud,” Charles Jr. told researcher Kathleen A. Hauke in 1983. Hauke donated her research on the family to the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection. “He spoke Polish. My grandmother was a lady from the word go. Real elegant, strait-laced. She looked white, but she was Creole French and black.”

Charles II was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1856. An 1860 U.S. Census record describes him as a free mulatto. Not a slave. He became a lawyer and married Virginia Simms, who was born in 1863, on December 23, 1886. In Detroit, the family lived north the legendary Black Bottom community in an ethnic melting pot of Polish Catholic, European Jews and blacks and whites from the South. Home was a matchbox-sized dwelling located at 863 Chene Street near Warren Avenue. They had four boys: Charles Anthony, born on November 25, 1887; Thomas Simms, born April 5, 1889; John Walter, born on February 21, 1892; and Claude, born in 1893. Thomas, a World War I veteran, died October 12, 1920, in an automobile accident in Minnesota; Claude died on September 22, 1955 of blood disease, specifically, uremic poisoning; Charles Anthony died on October 8, 1963; John died on December 13, 1975.

Charles II became a leading lawyer in Detroit. Fluent in French, Spanish, and Polish, Charles served clients both black and white in the lower east side community where European immigrants were the area’s largest set of residents. In fact, Detroit’s black population numbered at only 4,111 in 1900 only 1.4% of the city’s overall population. It skyrocketed to 120,000 by 1930. Charles II died on August 18, 1908 and wife Virginia died on December 26, 1935. Of the four Roxborough brothers, only Charles had children.

ROXIE AND CHARLEY

John Walter Roxborough was a cigar-smoking millionaire who during the 1940s co-managed world heavyweight champion Joe Louis whom he met in 1931 when the “Brown Bomber” was a teenager learning the “sweet science” at the Brewster Recreation Center. Roxborough was also a leading gambling racket boss who helped to operate a policy and numbers business, a form of illegal lottery, that landed he and business associate Everett Watson in Jackson State Prison between December 29, 1944, and October 4, 1946. The front-page scandal centered on a $10 million annual business and led to the indictment, prosecution, and prison sentences of street hustlers, police officers, and brass as well as former Mayor Richard Reading.

On April 24, 1940, a one-man grand jury headed by Judge Homer Ferguson reigned in 135 defendants, including 78 Detroit policeman, and handed down indictments on Roxborough, his brother Claude, the former mayor, former Wayne County sheriff Thomas Wilcox, and former Detroit police superintendent Fred Frahm, as well as a large number of police officials and those accused of gambling. Reading stood grimed faced, his eyes locked facing directly in front of him, his hands in his pockets. Defiant, the normally jovial Reading declared:

“It’s a lot of nonsense. It is ridiculous. I don’t even know what policy is. I don’t know what it is all about.”

At his arraignment, a stoic and unfazed, Roxborough chewing on a big cigar was quick to declare that whatever charges were leveled at him, his friend and client Joe Louis wasn’t involved. As for Roxie, however, he stated that he didn’t know “whether he had stubbed his toe.”

Roxie was accused of leading the so-called Big Four Mutual syndicate; Watson was accused of running the Yellow Dog policy house.

Judge Ferguson declared in June 1940:

“The Court is of the opinion that the evidence clearly show that after (Reading) took office there was an agreement between the parties to this conspiracy and the Mayor of Detroit. It is not disputed on the record that the Mayor accepted a consideration from the policy operators through one of the police inspectors (Inspector Raymond Boettcher of the Bethune Station) and Ulysses Boykin (known as the ‘Black Mayor.’”

On December 15, 1941, a jury of eight women and four men threw the book at Reading, Roxborough, and 20 others guilty of conspiracy with operation of a $10 million a year numbers and policy gambling racket during the years 1938 and 1939, which is about $167 million in 2015 dollars.

“This is the greatest injustice since the crucifixion of Christ,” Reading declared at the time.

On January 7, 1942, Reading was sentenced to four to five years in prison. Roxborough and Everett I. Watson, an insurance executive and manager for heavyweight boxer Roscoe Toles, as well as Walter Norwood, owner of the popular Norwood Hotel, too, were convicted on related gambling charges in 1942. Roxborough fought the case with vigor appealing to the state Supreme Court, and ultimately petitioned the United States Supreme Court but the nation’s high court refused to review the case on October 16, 1944. Lloyd Loomis, an African-American former an assistant state attorney who family roots ran deep in Detroit, represented Roxie.

“I was just a loaner,” Roxborough argued two decades later in 1966. “Just lent the outfit money to get started.”

Roxborough and co-defendant Watson, an African-American business partner, filed an appeal arguing against a statement that O’Hara made to a newspaper reporter. O’Hara, a white man, was quoted as saying that he didn’t want any blacks on the jury because they all played the numbers.

For more than 20 years Roxborough and Watson, lived the high life as two of Paradise Valley’s most powerful men and all that came with it. Glorious summers at Idlewild, a black-owned resort situated on the western side of the state near Lake Michigan. Memorable evenings at the Norwood and Gotham hotels complete with fat cigars, fine liquor, great music, and leisurely gambling. On December 29, 1944, however, during the midst of the festive holiday season, both men were introduced to a cold, matchbox-sized, ten-foot-long by six-foot wide Jackson Prison cell. Their iron bar neighbors were an assortment of common punks: pedophiles, dope pushers, serial burglars, con men, and murderers.

Sunnie Wilson, the affable entertainment businessperson who owned the all-the-rage Forest Club located at Forest and Hastings streets during the 1940s and the Mark Twain Hotel on Garfield near Woodward Avenue said about Roxie in his memoir Toast of the Town: The Life and Times of Sunnie Wilson:

“Despite Mr. Roxborough’s intransigence, I believe he and Mr. Watson were singled out by the investigation in order to set an example. The city’s attempt to break up the numbers hurt the economic condition of the black community. Black Detroiters saw the trial as a direct attack on their community…The only difference between the black folks’ policy and state-run lottery is that we had three digits and current game has six.”

Roxie was on February 21, 1892 in Louisiana. He attended Detroit’s Eastern High and studied law for one year at Detroit College of Law beginning in the fall of 1916. By the 1920s, he dabbled in the real estate business. He owned and published The Owl newspaper during the late 1920s and later doubled as an insurance executive. By 1934, he lived in an apartment located at 425 East Kirby near at Brush Street on the city’s near east side. The block was also home to Great Lakes Mutual Insurance Company, a black-owned firm that he helped to found. After he was granted a divorce from his first wife, Dora, in 1936, Roxie signed a $30,000 lump settlement to her. Adjusting for inflation, the sum translates to $510,000 today. The set of proceedings, which included two circuit court case dismissals and a failed appeal to the state Supreme Court, began in 1931. At one point, Dora sued Roxie for separate maintenance. He countered, accusing her of cruelty and messing around with other men. Dora took to him with a baseball bat when he refused to give her money, Roxie claimed. On another occasion Dora shot at him while he lay in bed, Roxie argued.

Here are a set of accusations, according to a 1934 Michigan Supreme Court case file called Roxborough v Roxborough:

July 1, 1926, plaintiff and defendant were married. They had long been acquainted. October 7, 1931, he filed a bill for divorce against her upon the ground of extreme cruelty, claiming she nagged and fussed at him; was addicted to gambling; demanded money of him to pay her gambling losses; and threatened to leave him if he did not take care of her folks. He claims she absented herself from home; engaged in playing poker, or other games of chance; her telephone bills were excessive, sometimes reaching $100 a month; she spent money without regard to plaintiff's welfare; had many charge accounts with different mercantile establishments; interfered with him during his working hours; threatened him; caused him shame, and interfered with his work; shot at him; and on some occasions fought him. He asked an injunction restraining her from preventing his coming home; interfering with him in his home; withholding his clothes; interfering with his business; or inflicting personal violence upon him.

Defendant denied all the material allegations of plaintiff's bill of complaint.

"She denies that at one time she shot at him, but alleges that she did so only after she was being given an unmerciful beating from the plaintiff and alleges that it was necessary to arm herself with a revolver in order to protect herself and to save her life."
She affirmatively alleges:

"That the plaintiff is associating with other women and keeping and maintaining other women in luxuries, and that because this defendant has remonstrated with him he has cut off entirely her means of support."

From a decree dismissing his bill of complaint, plaintiff appeals.

Although ordinarily there are three parties to a divorce proceeding, the State is not here particularly interested, there being no children and the parties being apparently well able to take care of themselves. They lived luxuriously. Defendant had diamonds worth approximately $10,000; a grand piano which cost nearly $4,200. Plaintiff presented defendant with a Packard automobile as a present, while he drove a 12-cylinder Lincoln car. Defendant admits her monthly bills for household and living expenses ran about $1,000, defendant claiming all this was at the request and with the consent of the plaintiff who wore $7.50 socks, and at one time sported 250 neckties that cost $6.50 apiece. She claims, and the proof indicates, plaintiff desired to maintain the finest home of any colored man in Detroit.

Their nuptial war routinely made headlines in the local black-owned newspapers, Michigan Chronicle and Detroit Tribune, as well national publications like Ebony and Jet.

After marrying his second wife, Wilhemina Morris of Indianapolis also known as “Cutie,” he built a spacious home in 1938 on the North End. Located at 235 Holbrook Avenue, the 3,500-square foot, six-bedroom and three-bathroom mini castle included a three-car garage. Known to some as “Black Santa Claus” because of his philanthropy to community organizations like the local NAACP and dozens of kids who boxed at the Brewster Recreation Center, Roxie later served as president of the Superior Life Insurance Society.

Roxie and Cutie divorced in 1956. An uncontested proceeding, he shrugged and shelled out even more dough: A cash settlement of $125,000 and $82,000 in property. Cutie died in 1971. When Roxie died in 1975, his home had been on the 19th floor of a federally funded senior hi-rise in Lafayette Park, the community once called Black Bottom. Pallbearers and honorary pallbearers at his homegoing service included Major League Baseball great Willie Mays, boxing champions Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson as well as famed barbershop quartet The Mills Brothers and legendary composer Eubie Blake.

“Without John Roxborough’s money, Joe (Louis) would have never have become the world-class fighter we know today,” Sunnie Wilson declared.

Charles known to some as “Charley” served in the Michigan Senate for a single term after being elected in 1930. The 6-foot-tall and fair-skinned Republican was a star basketball player at Eastern High School in 1905, and a learned scholar at the University of Detroit Law School graduating on June 18, 1914. Charley holds the distinction of being the only black man to participate in a state convention to repeal the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the 1933 action that ended the Prohibition era.

Charley, a distant and detached father, was arrested in Lansing in 1931 during the legislative term for being under the influence of alcohol.

“Pa wasn’t warm,” Charles Jr. also known as “Sonny,” told Kathleen A. Hauke in 1983. “I respected him cause he was a big man—he dressed good, looked good. He could have been a Congressman if he had switched parties. I know he was a periodic drinker. He could have been an alcoholic.”

“Ma and I were the closest and we’d go down to the dive and get him out. I was in my early teens—he’d be broke. We’d get a call from joint on Hastings Street. Ma would drive. We’d go to the back door and carry him out.”

The North End resident, who lived at 551 King, 531 Chandler and later 608 Woodland, wielded two unsuccessful campaigns for a U.S. House of Representatives seat during the 1930s, served on City of Detroit Planning Commission and was elected president of the body in 1938, and co-founded the Gamma Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. As a young man, he worked as a personal messenger for Gov. Chase S. Osborn. Two decades later, he was tapped to serve as an assistant state attorney by Gov. Frank Fitzgerald but turned it down. He did, however, accept an appointment to the state’s unemployment compensation commission.

He wasn’t afraid to challenge his political party if he thought that it was wrong. In fact, in 1948 he blasted GOP leaders for ignoring blacks.

In 1948, Charles threatened to bolt from the Michigan Republican Party and Governor Kim Sigler because of their shoddy track record on civil rights and equal opportunity issues:

In a letter to Emmett J. Scott of the Republican National Committee, Roxborough declared that 90 percent of the Negroes of Michigan will vote Democratic because ‘nothing has been done in Michigan by our Republican Governor or the Republicans locally, to keep the Negro vote in the Republican column.

“In all my years of politics I have never seen such a situation as exists today—white Republicans attempting to run Negro Republicans out of the Party and treating other like they do in the State of Mississippi.

Charley went into semi-retirement with his wife, Hazel, on their farm near Milford. He died on October 8, 1963, at age 75. Charley had four children, and married three times to Cassandra Pease of Hamilton, Ontario on June 30, 1913; Lottie Grady, an effervescent singer and dancer from Chicago, in 1919; and Hazel A. Lyman, an official at Detroit Recorder’s Court, in 1944. Charley and Lottie divorced in 1939. During the proceeding, Charley testified that he found letters in his home indicating that Lottie was in love with another man. His kids: Elsie, Virginia, Charles Jr., and John Walter were born between 1914 and 1922. The girls’ mother was Cassandra; the boys’ was Lottie.

“In the (Great) Depression we had money,” Sonny recalled many years later in 1983. “we had money; later, when other blacks had money, we didn’t”

Soaring, slender and striking, Elsie was a 1937 University of Michigan graduate and playwright who was romantically linked with Harlem Renaissance-era poet Langston Hughes and world heavy weight boxing champion Joe Louis. With large and forward sitting eyes like actress Bette Davis and bearing a resemblance to another Hollywood star Tallulah Bankhead, Elsie edited a newspaper called The Guardian, which was owned and operated by Charles Roxborough, her father.

In 1935, the Chicago Defender published a front-page story about she and Louis. In the story, Elsie flatly denied that she and boxer were engaged to be wed:

“Joe and I are friends and my career as a writer is much more important to me than the thought of marriage...I do think Joe is a fine fellow and well deserving of any girl.”

After moving to New York City during the 1930s in search of career fortune, she dyed her hair Lucille Ball-like auburn and lived as a white woman named Mona Monet. Her plays were presented in Detroit such as Langston Hughes’ Drums of Haiti and an adaptation of Walter White’s novel Flight. She had a screenplay embraced by Hollywood and she wrote feature magazine articles while in New York City. Elsie died October 2, 1949, of an overdose in her Manhattan apartment located at 865 First Avenue one block from the East River. She was identified as white on her death certificate.

Family and friends debated whether it was accidental or suicide. Elsie was described as ambitious and high-strung yet at times single-minded, lonely and depressed over the challenge of becoming a successful playwright and overcoming racism and sexism.

Her death made front-page news in the Michigan Chronicle. Bill Lane wrote in its October 8 issue:

“Energetic people find it hard to sleep at times. Sleeping pills come in handy. But sometimes one can take too many. Elsie took too many. Suicide? No. Elsie was the type of girl who would leave a note for everyone in the Roxborough family if she contemplated suicide. She left no note.”

“Elsie Roxborough was far ahead of her time,” Ulysses W. Boykin told researcher Kathleen A. Hauke in 1983. “She would have found a place for her talent and recognition now. In her time, it was quite a struggle for blacks. You could ‘pass’ and get lost, or if you stood out, it was an unsuccessful road.”

Julia Cole Bradby, a friend of Elsie’s who participated in the playwright’s theater troupe, Roxane Players, did not believe that she committed suicide. Bradby cited that a pair of stockings in her apartment had been washed and hung to dry. Bradby argued that Elsie accidently overdosed after drinking whiskey and digesting sleeping pills.

However, “Sonny” Roxborough, her half-brother, suggested in 1983 with researcher Kathleen A. Hauke that Elsie took her own life:

“Elsie was so educated, and there was nothing for blacks. She got hung up in the big city. She was very emotional and high-strung. She had so much ability, like a fine-bred racehorse, the way she carried herself. Her walk; she walked like a thoroughbred. She couldn’t handle the stress. She could pass for Spanish, but she didn’t like passing. She hated it. She committed suicide, you know. I don’t believe that she did it over, Langston Hughes. She loved no one man.”

Charley’s son, John II, was a star track athlete at the University of Michigan. He also became a lawyer and worked as an attorney for the Detroit Branch NAACP from 1950 to 1954 fighting against racism in housing and other civil rights issues as chair of the organization’s legal redress committee. He later worked as a U.S. state department official and adviser to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles during the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration.

“In the bustling Paradise Valley sector with its jam-packed Negro population, the word is when you get in trouble and need a lawyer, ‘take it to young Roxborough,” a 1960 feature on the Roxborough family in Sepia magazine stated. “He knows what to do in court.”

John II was born January 7, 1922; he died June 13, 2011. He married June Baldwin; they had two children: Claude, a lawyer, born in 1948; and John W. III, a dentist, born in 1949. June died on November 21, 2014. John II later married Mildred Bond, executive assistant to Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, in 1964.

Virginia and Charles Jr. were well known throughout Detroit and Idlewild, the popular black vacation resort on Michigan’s northwest side near Lake Michigan. Virginia also attended the University of Michigan after four years at Detroit’s Northern High School. In 1938, she married Benjamin Brownley, a Cleveland native and podiatrist. “Virgie,” a secretary at Cass Technical High School, died in 1982 after a valiant fight with cancer. Benjamin died in 1999. They had one child, Blyss born in 1953. Charles Jr. (Sonny) moved to Idlewild in the 1940s and retired as a substance abuse counselor at Regional Health Care in Baldwin. He married Loraine in 1938. They had two children: Carol and Charles. “Sonny” died in 2003.

PRESERVING THE LEGACY

“The whole family could have been considered snobbish,” said Kermit Bailer, a well-known attorney who grew up in Detroit during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. He described the Roxboroughs as “aloof, private and withdrawn.” Bailer, a former John F. Kennedy Administration housing official and Ford Motor Company attorney who died in 1996, had Roxie as a client during the 1950s. He described him as a “fine gentleman” who was “highly regarded.” About the Roxboroughs and their relationship to other blacks, Bailer summed it up this way during an interview with Kathleen A. Hauke in 1983:

“It was because of color consciousness within the black race. Every black was always struggling. As compared to the universe, they were snobbish. There was a lot of antipathy between the light-skinned blacks and the dark-skinned blacks.”

Today, the Roxborough family name lives on through Charles A. Roxborough’s great, great grandchildren Claude Roxborough III, a lawyer, John Roxborough, IV, a medical doctor, Erin Roxborough as well as other family members.

Ken Coleman is a Detroit-based author and historian. He wrote about the Roxborough family in his book “Million Dollars Worth of Nerve.” He can be reached at www.onthisdaydetroit.com