Race & taxes

By Joel Thurtell

“Seek not, and ye shall find” — that’s my motto.

Sporadically over the last few months, I’ve been trying to finish my journalism book, “Shoestring Reporter”, and the last stage involves selecting graphic elements.

It’s a two-stage process.

In the middle is serendipity.

First, I think of something, such as maybe a newspaper article I wrote ca. 1978, or maybe my old South Bend Tribune ID card or a photo of me doing something whacky for the old newspaper reporting job, like playing dodgeball with 20-somethings, trying to play a huge pipe organ or blowing a glass Christmas tree ornament.

The second stage involves actually trying to find the graphic things among the seven or eight file cabinets, various desks, boxes and heaps of documents that make up the Joel Thurtell Literary Collection.

This is the same motley assortment of personal and professional records I plan to sell to the University of Texas Library for several million dollars. Sorry to say, I’m only half-joking.

Already, I found something very exciting while searching through a lab drawer in quest of my old South Bend Tribune ID, which so far has not turned up. What I found on October 2, the day before my dad’s memorial service, was a photo I took of him several years ago at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum in Dayton. Dad was standing with one leg cocked up on the tire of a Republic P-47-N fighter plane like the one he flew –as he put it — “illegally” in 1945. But that is another story and I’ll write about it later.

Today, I was searching for the query letter I sent to the chief of the New York Times Detroit bureau back in 1979 when I was trying to persuade him to let me write about Michigan Indian fishing rights. He instead assigned a Times staffer to do the story, pissing me off royally. He supplied the staffer with my background information and promised (I found this in the file) to send me some “beer money” for my effort. I actually found the Times file, though not the query letter. But alongside it, I discovered something I’d forgotten all about: How I pitched a story to the Reader’s Digest back in 1984.

It was about the kind of endemic, unselfconscious racism I used to encounter in Berrien and Cass counties, where people were so confident of their own white-supremacism that they’d confide their disgusting values to a news reporter, expecting that the reporter, also white, would refrain from putting into print their ugly thoughts. When I’d go ahead and publish their remarks, they’d treat me as a betrayer.

I thought back then and still believe the story needed to be published. I also knew there was no local newspaper outlet for it, given its core issue, which was this bedrock white racism in Cass County, Michigan.

Why I thought Reader’s Digest might publish this story is beyond me.

But it’s a brave new world for writers, and we don’t need the likes of either the New York Times or Reader’s Digest.

Why, the Times just announced it’s laying off another 100 editorial staffers, or 8 percent of the newsroom.

Kiss them goodbye. We don’t need them!

We can publish these stories ourselves.

In my April 30, 1984 letter to the Life in These United States editor of Reader’s Digest, I explained that I was a South Bend Tribune reporter and had covered the April 10, 1984 meeting of the Cass County, Michigan, Board of Commissioners. A Mr. Brewster had risen and complained about his tax assessment, blaming it on race. Later, the Democratic commissioner from Calvin Township, Edwin Johnson III, gave me his take on Mr. Brewster’s complaint.

Here is the article that Reader’s Digest chose not to print:

Race and Taxes

An elderly gentleman from Cass County, Michigan, was upset because the tax assessment on his house had risen. He brought his complaint to the county Board of Commissioners, and nodding toward the only black member, made this argument: “My apologies to Mr. Johnson, but I was brought up believing that when colored move into your neighborhood, your property values go down. Well, we had a colored family move in — right next door. Now they’re fine people — the man’s a doctor and his wife’s a schoolteacher — but still, they’re colored, and it seems like my taxes should have gone down.”

After the meeting, the black commissioner, Edwin Johnson III, remarked that the old man had touched on a form of tax protest Johnson had never considered.

“Next time my assessment goes up,” said Johnson, “I’m going to tell the Board of Review they’ve made a big mistake. I’ll say, ‘Look here, not only do I have black people living right next door, but I’ve got blacks living in my house!”

Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com