Untold Glory African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement

Sidney Barthwell Jr. COURT MAGISTRATE Born September 1, 1947 Sidney Barthwell Jr. is a magistrate in Detroit, and in this capacity he is a judicial officer in a lower court whose jurisdiction is limited to the trial of misdemeanors, moving vehicular violations, and preliminary hearings on more serious charges. After attending what was then called Cranbrook School for Boys, he enrolled at Wayne State University, where he graduated in 1986. He taught second grade for half a year and was admitted to Harvard Law School in 1987. He received a law degree from Harvard in 1990 and was hired by Dickinson Wright, a major law firm that at the time employed 230 attorneys. After two years, Barthwell left Dickinson Wright and decided to focus his career on issues critical to the African American communities of Detroit. As one of the six magistrates appointed in the city, Barthwell works at the Thirty-sixth District Court and feels that through his efforts he can have an "impact directly on people's lives every day." ***** I grew up on the near west side of Detroit in an area known as the Boston Edison neighborhood. I think we moved into that house in 1949. My father was a pharmacist, and he lived in that house until the day he died, June 23, 2005. He owned a chain of drugstores. He also made his own ice cream. He had thirteen flavors. He used to make a half million gallons a year of ice cream. It was very popular at the timeBarthwell's Ice Cream. He was from Cordele, Georgia, originally. It's the county seat of Crisp County, Georgia, and it's about sixtyfive miles south of Macon, Georgia, straight down I75. His family migrated to Detroit around 1919. His father's name was Jack Barthwell. I think my father had seven brothers and sisters. My grandfather's work was agricultural in the South. But when he came up here, he worked at Ford for a lot of years in the foundry at the River Rouge complex. And eventually, he died as a result of iron particles in his lungs. My father died in his one hundredth year. I think he had eleven pharmacies at his height. He had three ice-cream stores. You know, back in those days, pharmacies all had soda fountains. Well, I grew up in a black middle-class environment. Detroit was kind of unique, but it wasn't totally unique. I think there's certain components of what I'm about to identify in a lot of major urban areas, but Detroit and Washington, D.C., are places that come to mind. Maybe to a lesser degree Chicago. It's unique in that there was this commingling between economic classes in the black community. So what you had when I was coming up, you had guys who were of a middleclass background whose fathers were professionals or whatever, in the black community, hanging out with guys who were street guys. So there was a lot of that intermingling because if you wanted to go party, for example, as a teenager in Detroit, you had to be able to fightor at least have some kind of strategy so you didn't get your ass kicked every time you went out to a party. My entree was basketball. I was a good basketball player, so I knew all the basketball players around the city, because I used to play at all the playgrounds. That's where all the good games were, and you got to know all the guys playing ball, and they were also the hoodlums. So you go to the party at night, and a guy might say, you know, "Don't bother him. He's my boy." These days, I might shoot a few baskets occasionally, but it's too physical for me. I just run. Right now, I run and play golf. I'm an average golfer. I was still playing a lot of ball when I was living in New York in the seventies. I played all over Harlem. In Detroit, there wasnRGovenar, Alan is the author of 'Untold Glory African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement', published 2007 under ISBN 9780767921176 and ISBN 0767921178.