Word: twelfth
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...income, are scattered all over the city, close to or mixed in with white residents. But unemployment is high among Negroes (6% to 8% v. the over all national level of 4%) and housing is often abominable. It is particularly ramshackle, crowded and expensive around the scabrous environs of Twelfth Street, once part of a prosperous Jewish section...
...They Won't Shoot." When the trouble began outside Twelfth Street's blind pig, the 10th precinct at that early hour could muster only 45 men. Detroit police regard the dawn hours of Sunday, when the action is heaviest in many slums, as a "light period." The precinct captain rushed containing squads to seal off the neighborhood for 16 square blocks. Police Commissioner Ray Girardin decided, because of his previous success with the method, to instruct his men to avoid using their guns against the looters. That may have been a mistake...
...Sold Brother." Looters skipped gingerly over broken glass to rake in wrist watches and clothing from shop windows. One group of hoods energetically dismantled a whole front porch and lobbed the bricks at police. Two small boys struggled down Twelfth Street with a load of milk cartons and a watermelon. Another staggered from a supermarket under the weight of a side of beef. One prosperous Negro used his Cadillac convertible to haul off a brand-new deep freeze...
...prices, often escalated to offset losses by theft and the cost of extra-high insurance premiums, irk the residents of slum neighborhoods. Most of the stores pillaged and destroyed were groceries, supermarkets and furniture stores; of Detroit's 630 liquor stores, 250 were looted. Many drunks careened down Twelfth Street consuming their swag. Negro merchants scrawled "Soul Brother"-and in one case, "Sold Brother" -on their windows to warn the mobs off. But many of their stores were ravaged nonetheless...
Into Next Year. The mobs cared nothing for "Negro leadership" either. When the riot was only a few hours old, John Conyers, one of Detroit's two Negro Congressmen, drove up Twelfth Street with Hubert Locke and Deputy School Superintendent Arthur Johnson. "Stay cool, we're with you!" Conyers shouted to the crowd. "Uncle Tom!" they shouted back. Someone heaved a bottle and the leaders beat a prompt retreat, not wanting to become "handkerchief heads" in the bandaged sense of the epithet. "You try to talk to these people," said Conyers unhappily, "and they'll knock...