Word: detroits
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seem. Steveland Morris had been blind since birth. He had also been unstoppable. By the time he was two, spoons in hand, Stevie was beating away rhythmically on pans and tabletops, or on dime-store cardboard drums. At nine, he was singing and playing harmonica up and down the Detroit ghetto streets, and being eased out of the church choir for singing rock 'n' roll. Three years later, he had become the "twelve-year-old genius" of Motown Records, the black pop giant. Rechristened Little Stevie Wonder, he was a strutting, shimmying minibopper who rode...
Right now Stevie has everything going for him. Sitting up there onstage, his head bobbing and weaving sightlessly as though trying to tune in on some private radar of the mind, he recalls no one so much as his old idol to whom he used to listen on Detroit's WCHB, the blind rhythm-and-blues great, Ray Charles...
...Detroit, the nation's fifth largest city, womb of the supercharged, fuel-injected future, the first bar of justice for alleged lawbreakers is quaintly called, in a reminiscence of 14th century England, Recorder's Court. Little beyond its name is Chaucerian. Until recently it was a paradigm of judicial systems crumbling under the burden of civic decay. Justin Ravitz, now a judge of Recorder's Court, once described it as "the cesspool of the legal world...
...prisoners, was packed with 1,500. One recorder's courtroom held an infamous bullpen into which each morning 30 to 40 wretched drunks were herded, prodded before the judge and out again to jail or the streets. The black community, which was soon to top 50% of Detroit's population, supplied most of the defendants, and black leaders often complained that Recorder's Court justice was far from colorblind...
...different complexion, with juries approximating the city's racial makeup. And juries virtually never vote to convict if there is any suspicion of police brutality. This, perhaps more than any other change, has brought court reformers into head-on collision with the police. A columnist wrote in the Detroit Police Officers' Association newspaper: "If a person accused of a crime appears before Judge James Del Rio and says he was beaten by the police, Del Rio calls the policeman a liar, and dismisses the case." Gary Lee, the association's president, declares: "The police know they...