Word: hamtramckers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Trouble In Hamtramck...
...toughest spots in U.S. education is the city of Hamtramck,* Mich. Hamtramck is a nest of factories, beer parlors and brothels entirely surrounded by Detroit. Hamtramckers were prominent among 400-odd Wayne County public servants indicted in recent years for assorted civic crimes. In two decades four Hamtramck mayors, one local State Senator and pecks of small political potatoes have gone to prison on liquor, vice and graft counts. When one mayor left jail, his constituents re-elected him, promoted him to be an isolationist Congressman...
...Once Hamtramckers boasted of their schools. Until he was killed in an auto accident in 1935, School Superintendent Maurice Reed Keyworth combined educational idealism and political savvy to create an astonishingly effective school system. Day & night schools enrolled 17,000 students-no less than 33% of the population. Teachers were (until the depression) well paid and protected from political pillaging by a merit system, the Keyworth Code. They hoped to change Hamtramck's character by raising a new generation of better citizens. Over the door of Copernicus High School was blazoned Keyworth's motto: "To develop individuals...
...Hamtramck's teachers won the support of the local Taxpayers Association and the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. When the Board tried to increase its badgering of teachers by rescinding the Keyworth Code, the Circuit Court threatened a contempt action. Fifteen hundred students demonstrated against the Board...
...that witnesses had been tortured until they squealed. The judge's guards slammed the door on McCrea's deputies, stuffed the judge's records into a vault. Next day. Judge Ferguson produced a second dripping forkful. Gambling dens, bawdy houses, running wide open in Detroit and Hamtramck, had long enjoyed official cooperation, said he. Among many officials, he specifically indicted Prosecutor Duncan McCrea...