Word: detroit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Blind Pig. Typically enough, Detroit's upheaval started with a routine police action. Seven weeks ago, in the Virginia Park section of the West Side, a "blind pig" (afterhours club) opened for business on Twelfth Street, styling itself the "United Community League for Civic Action." Along with the afterhours booze that it offered to minors, the "League" served up black-power harangues and curses against Whitey's exploitation. It was at the blind pig, on a sleazy strip of pawnshops and bars, rats and pimps, junkies and gamblers, that the agony began...
...clinics and the like. To cool any potential riot fever, the city had allotted an additional $3,000,000 for this summer's Head Start and recreation programs. So well did the city seem to be handling its problems that Congress of Racial Equality Director Floyd McKissick excluded Detroit last winter when he drew up a list of twelve cities where racial trouble was likely to flare...
Anywhere. McKissick's list has proved to be woefully incomplete. So far this summer, some 70 cities-40 in the past week alone-have been hit. In the summer of 1967, "it" can happen anywhere, and sometimes seems to be happening everywhere. Detroit's outbreak was followed by a spate of eruptions in neighboring Michigan cities-Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Flint, Muskegon, West Michigan City and Pontiac, where a state assemblyman, protecting the local grocery that he had owned for years, shot a 17-year-old Negro looter to death. White and Negro vandals burned and looted in Louisville...
Ironically, New York-like Detroit -has launched a major summer enter tainment program designed to cool the ghettos by keeping the kids off the streets. "We have done everything in this city to make sure we have a stable summer," said Mayor John Lindsay. But after one of those "stabilizing" events, a Central Park rock-'n'-roll concert featuring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, a boisterous band of some 150 Negroes wandered down toward midtown Manhattan, heaved trash baskets through the windows of three Fifth Avenue clothing stores and helped themselves. The looters' favorite...
Black & White. All of these were tame enough alongside Detroit. The violence there last week was not a race riot in the pattern of the day-long 1943 battle between Negroes and whites that left 34 known dead. Last week poor whites in one section along Grand River Avenue joined teams of young Negroes in some integrated looting. When the rioters began stoning and sniping at firemen trying to fight the flames, many Negro residents armed themselves with rifles and deployed to protect the firemen. "They say they need protection," said one such Negro, "and we're damned well...