Detroit

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Detroit is the first “race riot” I remember. It was only one in a long string of “race riots” in our nation’s history both before and after. I’ve done a lot of reading on them and my most recent not quite completed book the history of America’s persecution of Chinese adds to the list of them. I’ve just skipped over a section of the seventh chapter “A Litany of Hate” which author Jean Pfaelzer describes as her attempt to summarize the subject in the way the DC Vietnam War memorial attempts to list all the American soldiers who lost their lives in that war.

Here’s a photo of our trip past it last summer with our grandsons…

I have a better photo of an addition to the memorial. Its three weary soldiers vests open to allow ventilation in the oppressive heat of Vietnam walking toward the memorial. One of them is clearly a black American. Korea may have been our first integrated war but Vietnam was a whole nother world of integration a decade and a half later.

I was explaining to Claudia why I remember the Detroit riot so well. It happened in 1967 the year after I got to high school and began debate which prompted me to start reading my Dad’s newspapers in addition to watching what had become thirty minute news casts on the three television networks who competed mightily to get the biggest viewership by sacrificing profits for the money draining news divisions. It was a matter of prestige and the news anchors like CBS’s Walter Cronkite were viewed with something like reverence in the era before the news prostitution of Fox News family the Murdochs.

In my junior high school years in Lily white Mankato, Minnesota I became acutely aware that I had left an integrated elementary school and was now in a different world. My Kansas drawl led to my shortlived nickname “Reb.” Minnesota kids who knew nothing of their massacre of the Sioux were living in the centennial years of the Civil War and got regular reminders of the world one century earlier on television. The Rebel was one of my regular shows on TV about the life of an ex rebel soldier who had moved on to the American West where he got to nurse his bitterness in the world of cowboys. Its star was one of three in the iconic James Dean Movie, Rebel without a Cause, who died shortly afterward and help explain Billy Joel’s song title Only the good die young. (Although he probably has musicians like himself in mind because through my early life a dozen rockers died in small plane crashes on their way from and to gigs.) I’ve had my own brush with a small plane crash.

But the race riots of new Irish Americans, still smarting from the British allowing them to starve, and burning black areas in New York City because they didn’t like losing jobs to blacks who were more willing to work for less despite having lived on the continent two hundred years longer than the “micks” always got reported by the news as black riots. For the next century white people burning down black parts of cities were thought of as riots by negroes. Ironically, killing black people was the “negro problem.”

But 1967 was genuinely a black riot. Southern whites had migrated to northern cities and Motor City Detroit attracted them both. Lots of the whites were attracted and not discouraged from becoming police. There they could let their old southern prejudices lean into blacks crowded together into slums where white landlords could scrimp on keeping the plumbing and other amenities of life in top shape. Add a long hot summer, a draft that pulled high school drop outs into the Draft and then a war in Vietnam that was just beginning to be unpopular and years of the news finally showing America, white and black, just how bad it was in southern states together with the resentment of near daily police harassment of people and human volcanism should not be a surprise.

By coincidence this was the year that my family after being part of my integration into the infamous Topeka schools took in an African foreign exchange student to integrate the Mankato schools for the first time in anyone’s memory……I would pay attention to the infamous murderous Detroit riots and the ongoing court cases which sprung from the events depicted with incredible honest in this hard to watch movie. You will see everything I’ve described and more like Motown music in this movie which was highly praised but not watched and probably never made it to the Duluth. I finally got to see it and be reminded of the details I only had a dim memory of.

It was a percussor of a great many honestly black riots to follow the next year after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

I feel like reading from two of the books I’ve mentioned earlier, Driven Out and The Teacher Wars. I got past the Intro on the Teacher Wars and found the early history of not yet mandatory public education in America very interesting. I think the first 100 pages of this book will be very interesting and help me understand the education world my grandparents experienced in Kansas and Missouri from the 1880’s to my integration into the Topeka Schools in 1957. Past that I was in high school when teachers began lobbying for the right to strike and in college when they got it and in the teaching profession myself when they began using it and on the school board in the years after the Republican Party decided that crappy teaching was the ticket to election victories if not the actual repair of public schools.

If you are reading this immediately after I posted it at 6:16AM I haven’t edited it and I suspect it needs it……But I’m not in the mood with some interesting history at my beck and call.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty