'Deeds Not Words': Happy birthday, Daddy

Clarence C. Campbell, Sr. (see video at the bottom)

This man was born 100 years ago today. The world has never been the same.

Georgia-born, he became a child refugee in the Great Migration when his father moved their small family north to Michigan where the father went to work for a booming automaker in a rising place called Flint. He was a boy during the Great Depression and, years later, was working as a janitor at AC Spark Plug when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

In December 1942, he kissed his young bride goodbye and marched off to war in Europe. After combat training in Fort Huachuca in the Arizona desert, he eventually went ashore overseas somewhere in Leghorn, Italy, with elements of the 92nd Division, the all-black combat unit in Uncle Sam's segregated Army. There, his division, part of the Fifth Army, fought its way up the Ligurian Coast and into the Northern Apennines and Italian Alps smashing German Nazis. When Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was captured, executed by Italian partisans and his corpse hung in a public square in Milan, he was just 20-25 miles away.

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After doing his part to help eliminate the fascist threat abroad, he returned to his wife and together they began building a wonderful life in a neat little ranch-style home on Maybury on Flint’s expanding southside.

First, there was one, then two, then three little children, the last of whom would be developmentally disabled. At a time when it was still customary to segregate and institutionalize intellectually disabled children, he and his wife said, “No.” Madeline would remain in their care, with her family. They would do things as a family, like taking a ferry across the Florida Straits in 1956 to visit Cuba.

Closing out the ‘50s and into the mid-60s, the “original three,” as Madeline coined the first wave, was joined by four, five and six.

Meanwhile, he built a summer cottage on a small lake in Michigan’s thumb region that became a weekend resort area for scores of Black families from Flint and Detroit. A sanctuary of sorts, it was also a place to where he seriously considered evacuating the family at the height of the Cuban missile crisis when nuclear war with the Soviet Union was a blink away.  

​In August 1963, he stood at the water’s edge of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool – “so close I could have put my feet in,” he said – to hear Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. share his dream during the March on Washington.

When his oldest son prepared to board a Greyhound bus to report for military service, unsure whether the young man was destined for a tour in Vietnam, he and his wife made sure the little kids were present for the sendoff. And while the eldest son was overseas, stationed in Thailand, he sent him a copy of the yearbook for the elementary school that his daughters and youngest son attended. He understood the power of everyday news and pictures from the home front for soldiers stationed aboard.

​A man, joined by his wife, he was filled with so much wanderlust that he lived as if the Interstate Highway System was a gift conceived and built for him.

Clarence the Lion. His choice of cologne was a redolent mixture of gasoline, sweat and cigar smoke, and he moved to the summer soundtrack of a screeching circular saw and Detroit Tigers baseball blaring from a transistor radio. A man who settled and mellowed into his twilight years, comfortable and revered as the patriarch of his branch of the Campbell clan, he was known affectionately as “Papa” to his horde of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Though not a born conversationalist, his life epitomized the motto of the Buffalo Soldiers of the 92nd Division: “Deeds not words.”

​Happy birthday, Daddy. You did well by us all.