Buyer Beware

On Detroit's comfortably middle-class Robson Avenue one evening last week, 500 angry people acted out a savage syllogism: 1) Negroes are not welcome on Robson Avenue, 2) the new family is Negro, 3) the new family must get out. To emphasize the harsh conclusion, bigot hands hurled stones through two front windows of the neat brick house. Inside, John Rouse and his family, who had moved in the day before, were shocked and bewildered.

A 69-year-old retired bodyguard who once worked for the late Detroit Industrialist Walter O. Briggs Sr., Rouse insisted that he was half Cherokee, half French Canadian, and his wife Scotch-Irish by descent--but nobody listened.

Instead, he was visited by officers of the neighborhood improvement association, who "started questioning us and demanding that we sell to them." The shattered windows fresh in his mind, Rouse agreed. The sale price was $18,500, or $2,000 more than he paid; in return he was to move his wife Bertha, 70, his daughter Merle Evelyn Hickman and her sons Alfred, 10, and Paul, 7, within 60 days. While the sale was being closed, a crowd of 500 milled outside; in a campaign that would have shamed racist South Africa, doorbells had been rung through the neighborhood in an effort to bring out 1,000 people.

Even in Detroit, where unsteady race relations make a police "commando squad" necessary, indignant voices were raised for Rouse. Detroit University's Father John E. Coogan, S.J., chairman of the city's Commission on Community Relations, urged the Rouse family to "refuse to yield to violence." Rouse, who said he had always lived in white neighborhoods without trouble, confessed he had no stomach for pioneering among "people who start trouble without even seeing me and my wife. I would have held out except for the grandchildren. If they lived here and went to school, the kids would pick on them, maybe rough them up. It could hurt them, maybe ruin their lives." Improvement Association President Thomas J. Collins had a more pointed answer: "It doesn't matter what Father Coogan says now. The Rouses will sell. We've made the deposit. We're willing to accept the loss and that's it."

But there was more than that. Robson Avenue turned its attention to Mr. and Mrs. Peter Hays, who had sold their home to Rouse and moved to suburban Livonia.

A delegation paid a special visit to Livonia to warn the Hays' new neighbors that the Hays needed watching because they were just the type who would sell a home to Negroes.

In all the passion and prejudice there was one heartening note: Mrs. Rouse's old neighbors telephoned to urge the Rouses to move back to their old home on American Avenue.

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