Word: guardsmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cocktails at newly pillaged stores. Fires started in the shops, spread swiftly to homes and apartments. Snipers took up posts in windows and on rooftops. For four days and into the fifth, mobs stole, burned and killed as a force of some 15,000 city and state police, National Guardsmen and federal troops fought to smother the fire. The city was almost completely paralyzed...
Spreading Fires. Rushing to Detroit at midday Sunday, Michigan's Governor George Romney called in 370 state troopers to beef up the defenses, then by late afternoon ordered 7,000 National Guardsmen mobilized...
Empty Streets. As Detroit's convulsion continued into the week, homes and shops covering a total area of 14 square miles were gutted by fire. While U.S. Army paratroopers skillfully quieted their assigned trouble area on the East Side, National Guardsmen, jittery and untrained in riot control, exacerbated the trouble where it all started, on Twelfth Street (see box). Suspecting the presence of snipers in the Algiers Motel, Guardsmen laid down a brutal barrage of automatic-weapons fire. When they burst into a motel room, they found three dead Negro teen-age boys-and no weapon. The Guardsmen...
...Spot. That was also true of the National Guardsmen. The crack of a sniper's bullet-and sometimes simply the bang of a firecracker or the pop of a light bulb-brought forth fantastic fusillades from police and National Guard rifles, shotguns, machine guns and pistols. Four-year-old Tonia Blanding was shot dead in an apartment when lawmen saw her uncle strike a match to light a cigarette, mistook the flare for a sniper's muzzle flash, and poured bullets through the window...
...ordered: "You get out of here, boy. Faster, boy. You run out of here." The man had no choice but to accept the humiliation and jog off. A couple and their three friends were ordered to lie on the ground, and then were threatened by more than a dozen Guardsmen armed with automatic weapons. Lieut. General John L. Throckmorton, the Army paratroop commander who took control of the Guardsmen when they were federalized, was asked what he thought of them. "Look," he pleaded, "don't put me on a spot like that...