Detroit, 1967: What the 'riot' meant By Jack Lessenberry

Published on The Smirking Chimp (http://www.smirkingchimp.com)

Detroit, 1967: What the 'riot' meant
By Jack Lessenberry

Everybody knows that Detroit exploded in a fury of looting and burning and, later, killing in July 1967. Everyone also pretty much agrees things haven't been the same since. And that's about as far as agreement about what happened goes. Lots of talking heads will be trying to explain it this week and next, in broadcast media specials and analyses in the newspapers. Most Detroiters — most Americans — were not alive when the riot happened. I was alive, by the way, and I was here, a politically interested and aware teenager. I had no special experiences worth relating. Except that I did live through what everyone at the time called, simply, "the riot," and have read volumes about it and what it did to us, ever since.And I know the truth is that we have never gotten over it.

The truth is also that much of Detroit is mostly a not-so-magnificent ruin now. There is a bustling little stadium and entertainment district. You can find a few very fine restaurants, amid tens of thousands of abandoned buildings. Yes, and in recent years have come high-rises and elegant lofts for the yuppies and buppies and well-off DINKs (double income, no kids). There are a few neighborhoods, such as Sherwood Forest and Palmer Woods, with mostly still-lovely homes where the middle-class and the politicians live.

The residents struggle valiantly against the crime and mostly bypass the impoverished and dreadful school system, and try to pretend life is normal. Yet it is not, not in the sense that life is normal in Southfield or South Lyon, and that, too, has a direct connection to the steamy summer night on July 22-23, 1967, when the police raided a blind pig and all hell gradually broke loose.

Detroit was a different place then, a city in transition, but a big, thriving, segregated yet multi-racial city that still believed in progress. Yes, it was losing people to the suburbs — but there were nearly twice as many people as today. Though the black population was steadily increasing, nearly two-thirds of Detroiters were still white. Virtually all the money and power was white.
There were no black reporters at either of the big newspapers. Blacks couldn't get lots of good jobs. They were locked out of apprentice programs for the best craft unions. Only one of nine councilmen was black, only two of seven school board members, and very, very few policemen.
Far more than today, whites had no idea what went on in the black world. They thought progress was being made, that things were gradually getting better. That was easy for them to believe, since they didn't know many blacks, and a few high-profile tokens were getting jobs. The young mayor, Jerome P. Cavanagh, had been elected with heavy black support. The governor, George Romney, was for civil rights. The president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had told the nation, "We shall overcome." Many white Detroiters thought things were actually starting to go the blacks' way. Too much so for some whites, including one of my aunts, an ignorant woman who told us, "You give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile."

Then came the riot....


Barely 875,000 people remain in the city, the vast majority black, a huge number of them poor. Whites are currently moving out absurd distances with impossible commutes to avoid fixing the real problem. Someday, that will have to stop. We will have to work together to clean up the nest we've fouled and the messes we've made. Then, and only then, maybe we'll be able to deal with the legacy of those long-ago days in July.
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About author Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Detroit's Metro Times.
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I, TOO, LIVED THROUGH THE RIOT. I WAS 12 YEARS OLD, ATTENDING SUMMER SCHOOL TO SKIP A HALF A GRADE, AND MISSED AT LEAST 2 WEEKS OF SCHOOL DUE TO THE RIOT AND STILL WAS PERMITTED TO SKIP HALF OF 7TH GRADE...TWO YEARS LATER, MY FAMILY MOVED TO MASSACHUSETTS (THE STICKS AREA) AND SUFFERED A MASSIVE CULTURE SHOCK. NOW BACK IN THE STATE, IF NOT THE CITY, I CAN SEE SOME IMPROVEMENT IN DETROIT, BUT ONLY WHILE CLINTON WRESTED THE GOP FOOT OFF OUR ECONOMIC NECKS. THE REST OF THE STATE STILL TORTURES DETROIT, AND SUFFERS FOR IT. CITIES ARE THE ECONOMIC ENGINES OF A NATION--WHICH IS WHY THE US IS IN SUCH BAD SHAPE. ALL OUR US CITIES WERE DESTROYED BY RIOTING, SUBURBAN AND RED-NECK POLITICS, AND THE GOP IMPLODING THE ECONOMY.

is a great read on this one slice of the riot in Detroit.
A friend who lived there told me he was shot at by national guard jeep mounted machine gun.
Also told me that a police substation was under fire for 24 hours before the authorities could get help to them. Many prisoners taken during the riots were moved to open roofed showers on Belle Island. Many of them escaped and swam the river back to Detroit.

is that just as cities were the engines of economic growth, so too were they the engines of immigrant advancement and Democratic Party strength and union strength.

This rich soil mix carried our nation forward for hundreds of years. But after the 50's and the start of civil rights and women's movements, those with more money and relative power than sense of history started to construct this fiction about farmers, suburbs, Big Business, Communism, the traditional family, and other imaginary ills and so forth and actively fought to shut down the cities, the unions, the uppity immigrants and the Democratic Party.

And this is the story of today, rooted in the years following WWII, shortly after the GI Bill brought a generation into colleges and skilled white collar jobs and the urge to progress. Those who hadn't had their prejudices blown open and away by the dramatic changes from WWII and its aftermath, those who longed for a simpler, better time (the Great Depression, perhaps?) have been working night and day to bring those simpler times back.

Well, any day now, I expect the stock market will crash dramatically. The current run-up is more than irrational exuberance. And we will return to 1929. It is as inevitable as any natural disaster. And anything but natural.

With the implementation of the Federal Reserve Bank, they have learned certain things they can do to slow down or speed up the economy but they can't stop the inevitable.

but the land beckoned and the developers raped it wholeheartedly. Many returning from ww2 and korea had a gi bill that gave them the opportunity to buy a home, raise a family and do things their predecessors(?) never could. My parents were one of those couples. The factories were in town, near railroad tracks. They made steel, cars, candy, textiles and unimaginable other items, the unions were there to prevent the 40 hour work day and most families had health insurance. Then some short time prior to the Detroit riots, the moneyed figured that the colored(I apologize for using that word) were making enough to buy all of the above and send their kids to college. In my opinion, they couldn't let that happen, so...........agitators were used to cause schisms in the races which haven't even been close to being healed since. Why else let all that investment go away?

I think Lessenberry is spot-on as he usually is when he writes about Detroit.

One of the things that helped cause the Newark riots was the mass demolition project to build the New Jersey University of Medicine and Dentistry. A huge African-American neighborhood was being cleared, in what was popularly known as "Negro removal" instead of urban renewal. At the time, residents received little assistance to relocate. This created a great sense of anger.

There are allegations that the National Guard over-reacted after they were called in. They claimed that snipers were everywhere and shot many people.

The riots destroyed the businesses that served the neighborhoods, and caused the remaining middle class to flee the city.