Alexis Clark

<h1>It’s a vision of two Detroits that have mostly faded now — the social set born of the American auto industry’s vast wealth and the galvanizing magic of ’60s Motown — together in a room.</h1>

In June 1965, the Supremes, one of America’s biggest and most glamorous groups, performed at a debutante party at the Country Club of Detroit in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the posh all-white enclave just northeast of the city.

It was the debutante party of Christy Cole Wilson, and The New York Times pictures of the event tell a layered story of two groups connected, at least for the evening, by the music of that time and place.

The three elegant darlings of Detroit, led by 21-year-old Diana Ross, serenade a room of finely attired guests, many of practically the same age. But between the groups were also the realities of race and class — the distance between Grosse Pointe and the Brewster projects where the Supremes grew up, 10 miles and several worlds away.

The Times covered the lavish event in avid detail. “It took three days, hundreds of fresh blue irises, thousands of little Italian lights and hundreds of thousands of yellow plastic flowers to turn the club into a French garden,” the story enthused. “Whole walls had disappeared behind Austrian silk panels of gold and mirrors before the 750 guests arrived.”

Not until the eighth paragraph did the story mention that “when they were not dancing and being entertained by a rock ‘n’ roll group called the Supremes, the Wilsons and their guests were polishing off 20 cases of French Champagne, attempting to create a liquor shortage (the plot failed), and heaping their plates with food from an abundantly stocked buffet table.”

The trio hardly needed an identifier at that point. Between August 1964 and June 1965, the Supremes had five No. 1 singles, including “Baby Love,” “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “Back in My Arms Again,” which had gone to the top of the charts just six days before this party. Which is exactly why Wilson’s parents hired them.

“Everyone had very glamorous deb parties when I was growing up,” said Wilson Hofmann, 72, who now lives in Bristol, Rhode Island.

Her father, Ralph C. Wilson Jr., a millionaire insurance scion who had “a stable in Lexington, Kentucky., and the Buffalo Bills football team,” seemed happy to toast his daughter in such style. The event reportedly cost $85,000, which would be roughly $675,000 today. (This was just the hometown event; the 18-year-old Wilson had already been formally presented at the Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in New York in December 1964.)

It was an era when families of distinction across the country presented their daughters to society, with the intention that suitable men from similar backgrounds would meet their future wives. In Grosse Pointe, it was the “Ford girls,” the great-granddaughters of Henry Ford, who had ramped up the deb-ball arms race. Nat King Cole sang at Charlotte Ford’s storied party in 1959, while Ella Fitzgerald performed at her sister Anne’s soiree in 1961.

Racial dynamics were changing in the 1960s, but often in fits and starts. The Supremes performing at a private club in Grosse Pointe, which still had no black residents, reflected this lurching progress.

“Music filtered in,” said Izzy Donnelly, director of education at the Grosse Pointe Historical Society. “The ’60s were about breaking tradition. Bringing black entertainers to debutante balls and private clubs was putting a big foot in the front door.”

It wasn’t an intentional political statement to hire the Supremes to perform at her party, Wilson Hofmann said. She chose them because she loved their music, and she was from a family that could make her request happen.

“I grew up in Grosse Pointe and loved the Supremes and that kind of music, like the Temptations and Marvin Gaye,” Wilson Hofmann said.

“They were extraordinarily popular with white audiences, black audiences and everyone else,” said Dolores Barclay, an author and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who collaborated with Diana Ross on the singer’s memoir. “Appearing in white venues was breaking down racial barriers. But it’s a different type of disruption. It’s nonconfrontational. It’s having a platform and saying, ‘Yes, we’re here, we’re great and we’re a part of American music.’”

The Supremes were homegrown celebrities in Detroit and received star treatment, but there were black entertainers across the country still entering clubs and performance halls through the kitchen.

“Anything in the South was still tenuous,” said Coraleen Rawls, collections manager at the Motown Museum in Detroit. “On one hand, we had artists who were happy to perform because that’s their passion and vocation. But it was also disheartening to be international stars and still be treated differently.”

Just two years after Wilson’s debut, Detroit would experience the devastating unrest of 1967, as the city’s racial and economic disparities exploded into national awareness. And the Motown sound would prove to be a powerful force in the healing process.

“It unified people and brought us all together,” Rawls said. “Where there were ropes between whites and blacks, those ropes started disappearing, as the people on both sides were like, ‘We’re all dancing. Why do we have to have a rope in the middle? You’re dancing, I’m dancing. We’re singing, you’re singing, so why do we have to be separated by some rope because of some thoughts prior to our generation as to how you think we should be?’”

The year after the Supremes played Wilson’s party, the first black family moved to Grosse Pointe, and by 1974, The Times reported that three African-American families called the town home. In 2019, Grosse Pointe Farms, where the Country Club of Detroit is, remains 94 percent white, while the city of Detroit is 79 percent black.

The deb parties continued in Grosse Pointe, albeit in a scaled-back fashion. In 1970, The Times covered the celebration for Sheila Ford, another heir of the automobile family. She opted for a short purple dress instead of traditional formal attire, and hired the group Sha-Na-Na, who “played what the listeners called real modern blues music.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="cc3bd3ce-bb31-47b1-b469-12c293f221a2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/arts/supremes-photos-motown-grosse-pointe.html">The New York Times</a>.

For One Night in 1965, the Supremes Brought the Two Detroits Together

In June 1965, the Supremes, one of America’s biggest and most glamorous groups, performed at a debutante party at the Country Club of Detroit in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the posh all-white enclave just northeast of the city.

For one night in 1965, the supremes brought the two Detroits together

<h1>They were called “brown babies,” or “mischlingskinder,” a derogatory German term for mixed-race children. And sometimes they were just referred to as mutts.</h1>

They were born during the occupation years in Germany after World War II, the offspring of German women and African-American soldiers. Their fathers were usually transferred elsewhere and their mothers risked social repercussions by keeping them, so the babies were placed in orphanages.

But when Mabel Grammer, an African-American journalist, became aware of the orphaned children, she stepped in. She and her husband, an army chief warrant officer stationed in Mannheim, and later Karlsruhe, adopted 12 of them, and Grammer found homes for 500 others.

From 1950 to 1954, and from 1959 to 1965, during her husband’s two postings in Germany, Grammer helped bring about adoptions on behalf of African-American couples in the United States and black army families in Germany. She called her program the Brown Baby Plan.

There were about 5,000 of these babies born between 1945 and 1955, with the numbers reaching upward of 7,000 in the 1960s, according to records from the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, although the exact count is unknown.

Although many German mothers wanted desperately to keep their children, they saw what the other mothers faced: They were ostracized, denied jobs, housing and ration cards, and were unable to feed their babies or themselves.

“Women faced the stigma of being unmarried, having a baby out of wedlock and having a baby who wasn’t white with a man who was part of the occupation,” said Silke Hackenesch, who researches postwar adoptions and is a history professor at the University of Cologne in Germany.

For Germans, the presence of the half-black children was also a reminder of a defeated nation.

Grammer got to work, visiting orphanages and speaking to the nuns who ran them.

She wrote articles for the Afro-American, a newspaper in Baltimore, reporting on the dire situation and asking black families to step forward and adopt.

In 1956, she wrote: “I can’t understand why people think it is so strange for a colored couple to adopt these children. Don’t they think we have hearts, too? And you don’t have to be wealthy to adopt children. I never had so little financially as we have now, but my children are just as well provided for as any others. If you really want to do something, you can.”

Other black publications picked up the story and word began to spread.

Although international adoption laws were still in development, Grammer managed to maneuver through bureaucratic red tape, approaching German officials as a private agency. She was able to arrange adoptions by proxy for African-American couples who were unable to travel to Germany.

She published a step-by-step adoption guide in the Afro-American, and interested couples provided her with letters of reference as well as proof of education, income, housing and other paperwork required by the State Department and German authorities. She appeared in German courts on behalf of American couples, and after approaching several airline companies, persuaded Scandinavian Airlines to fly the children at a reduced fare to their new homes in the United States.

“She did what militaries and what the government and what the community wouldn’t do,” said journalist and filmmaker Regina Griffin, who made the documentary “Brown Babies: The Mischlingskinder Story.”

Her yearning to help the orphans ran deeper; she was unable to bear children of her own.

Mabel Treadwell was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, around 1915. She was one of seven children to Pearl and Edward Treadwell, a bellhop who died of a heart condition when Grammer was a child. At 10, she suffered from peritonitis, a life-threatening illness caused by an inflammation of the abdominal cavity that had ruptured her appendix. There were no black hospitals in the area, and the family couldn’t afford to pay for surgery. Grammer eventually recovered but the severity of her illness left her infertile.

She graduated from Ohio State University and became a journalist. She also worked at the War Department, where she pushed for desegregation of the graves of servicemen who were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

“It’s quite an injustice to be segregated even in death after serving their country,” said Lt. Gen. Nadja West, the Army surgeon general, who was also the youngest child adopted by the Grammers in Germany.

In 1950, she married Oscar Grammer. While in Europe, she traveled to a Catholic shrine in Lourdes, France, with other army spouses. She was deeply religious and discovered a need to help others. Shortly after, she started the Brown Baby Plan.

During the Grammers’ time in Germany, the house was full of children. Local newspapers called Grammer “the Black Fairy.”

“Basically she stretched every penny on my dad’s salary,” West said. “It’s all about faith for us in our family.”

But there were difficult times, too. One of her adopted sons, Edward, died of leukemia in 1955 when he was 9.

The Brown Baby Plan wasn’t free of controversy. Some German social service agencies felt Grammer wasn’t experienced enough in child welfare matters to oversee adoptions, and some civil rights groups felt the more urgent need should be helping African-American children living in the Jim Crow South, not babies abroad. And years later a few of the babies described being raised by cruel adoptive parents.

“I was stunned to find out there were those of us who didn’t live in loving and nurturing homes,” said Shirley Gindler-Price, who was 2 when a black military family adopted her in Ansbach, Germany. Her family later settled in Philadelphia where Gindler-Price, 66, founded the Black German Cultural Society, a community for the now-grown children and their descendants.

“She was essentially a one-woman adoption agency and did the best she could,” Griffin added.

Grammer and her family settled in Washington in 1965. In 1968, she and her husband received a humanitarian award from Pope Paul VI. Of the babies that remained in Europe, some also remained in orphanages or were adopted by German and Danish families.

Grammer died in 2002 of complications from hypertension and dementia. She was about 88.

“Sometimes when I look back I don’t know how she did all the things she did,” West said. “I just think of my own life. The opportunities to be where I am today would not have been there. I know that for a fact.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="bf0e8bf2-1a4a-465d-be43-7584625c1941" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/obituaries/mabel-grammer-overlooked.html">The New York Times</a>.

Overlooked No More: Mabel Grammer, whose brown baby plan found homes for hundreds

They were born during the occupation years in Germany after World War II, the offspring of German women and African-American soldiers.

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Alexis Clark

Articles written by the author

For one night in 1965, the supremes brought the two Detroits together

Overlooked No More: Mabel Grammer, whose brown baby plan found homes for hundreds