Following the war industrialization that ended in the 1950s, Detroit began to decline. A second wave of African people in America arrived from the US South, competing for shrinking manufacturing employment with Whites. Forty years after the 1967 revolts across America, Detroit remains a symbol of the post industrial US: Chrysler, Ford and others long ago globalized and now suffer huge economic losses.

The other day, I read an article about Detroit. There was a lot of looking back at the devastation in 1967. African people in America and riots, what we call uprisings, are an obsession in American corporate and racist media. I believe this newsmill was the Detroit Free Press, called the Freep I suppose because it really is ludicrous, the idea of a city ruled by automotive industry corruption having freedom of expression. But back to the writing about riots. What really happened? Will it happen again? When will one begin? Why? Who? Where?

I find it ridiculous.

Especially the bizarre focus on our people.

Fighting injustice is not without framework.

The written piece on Detroit had a lot of older men speaking on what had taken place; burning of avenues and avenues of Michigan’s largest city and the early 20th century’s Silicon Valley. The police couldn’t handle the rage of not all but many people cramped into war zones passing as neighborhoods.

Yet, a subtle message underlying African people in America resisting is that a violent, unpredictable boiling can strike out at Whites and “respectable” people at any time.

Police raiding a US war veterans homecoming party in an illegal space for drinking sparked a furnace of anger and the revolt began. Joblessness, schools that were a ticket to prison, early pregnancies and racial discrimination in employment plagued those who had fled KKK terror in the South. In 1943 some of the same conditions had resulted in similar battles between Whites and African people. Heroin addiction elevated wasted self worth. National Guard troops were deployed. People breaking into shops to get food were shot in the back. Four year old girls were killed by .50 caliber guns used in Viet Nam-aimed at houses in Detroit. Blind men at a bus stop were shot dead by soldiers. Underground armies of Viet Nam veterans, youth, employed and unemployed women and men and street gangs took them on guerilla style. Fires grew and smoke billowed into the Canadian peninsula where an arc of Ontario refugee settlements for the people who had fought off slavers once existed. But the tanks and bayonet wielding soldiers brought martial law and helped Detroit police terrorize the households of thousands of people. America raged harder, banks and real estate agencies refusing to rebuild long stretches of the city blocks that African people (and military tank fire) destroyed. Supermarket chains vanished, health clinics were isolated stations among the ruins. Liquor stores and blood banks then sprouted everywhere. Capitalism and its retaliation is a fearsome beast.

Now, I have been gone from America nearly ten years. And the last time I was in Detroit six adults could fit in most of the autos produced day and night in plants like Dearborn’s Rouge. Uncle LC (that was his name my relatives told me, that’s the way it was done down South) lived there. Impoverished East Side youth like Diana Ross had left public housing and Motown for greater commercial fame. Over the decades, John Lee Hooker, Malcolm X lived and walked among the communities shunned and segregated racially by Whites. Sometimes most hostile were the recent Eastern European migrants. In Philadelphia, as youth, we called them insults just like they cursed us. As in many US cities, by the year 1971, they fled as far away from African people as possible. Some Anglicized their names and ‘became White‘. Opening private schools to prevent their children from complying with federal Civil Rights guidelines on education, the world in which they lived was ‘quarantined’, sealed off from relating to us. I saw this great gulf as I reached puberty when my family became one of a few hundred African “American” families in the midst of 80,000 Whites in a Philadelphia suburb.

My first visit to Detroit was back in the beginning of the ’80s. I saw a complete nighttime lockdown in the city center; only police cars cruised along, and this stayed in my mind for years.

The last time I saw Detroit was in 1999, from the Windsor, Ontario Canada side of Lake Ontario. A moment in time I also won’t forget, I was by then a United Nations refugee claimant in Canada. For trying to build some self reliance for the people I was persecuted. Building Food cooperatives, supporting cultural and political education centers and associating with mentors who had survived FBI COINTELPRO in the 1960s were a crime in the eyes of American government and society. I documented, along with my wife, the continuation of US counterintelligence against our lawful efforts in America and we were found eligible to bring the Political Refugee claim. The retaliation of the FBI had extended into Canada by 1998.

At the crest of my forties, I by then had seen Beirut ruined cities like Detroit, like Washington DC, like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and others socially and economically meltdown. There was little a few overwhelmed activists could do against a court and prison complex criminalizing the youth at an alarming pace.

From exile, I know that the story of Detroit ’67 is defined mainly by the same forces that pummelled the people into submission. Retaliation by the US society-its government, local, state and federal, the silent agreement to deal the people the worst hand, isn’t spoken of. The Canadian government had, by the dawn of the George Bush administration, elected to put us out of Canada in the middle of our UN refugee claim and while we had the case being appealed at the Ottawa Federal Court. We fled again, to Sweden.

Often, I get reports of the self destructive deaths in Detroit and ongoing hate towards people who look like me, and share a heritage of resisting an America that cannot and will not accept us.

I see the opportunists among us that have done little to contribute to a history of agitating for revolutionary change in Detroit. There is solemn resignation as “lifetime” $30 dollars an hour jobs dry up in the car making industry-pensions and healthcare are not guaranteed anywhere in the USA.

Today I hear that the Chaldeans, Lebanese, South Koreans, Indians, Arabs and others have thousands of convenience stores across Detroit and that no major supermarkets are in a city with close to a million people. Not many, given this city’s population of Africans, own grocery or food businesses. Few Whites are going to take chances in Detroit as businesspeople. Chrysler and Ford are dying a slow death. The Whites, and the middle and upper class African “Americans” have tried to escape social problems in the outer suburbs but the guns and drugs, the rage and the despair trails behind them.

A generation or two knows nothing of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and their international scope. Elijah Muhammad built Mosque #1 of the Nation of Islam in Detroit. Not only Motown but the cultural sounds of Aretha Franklin, Brother Will Hairston and others gave voice to a peoples’ dreams. The Republic of New Afrika held a 1969 Declaration of Independence from America in Detroit. Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman, in 1967 provided Detroit and the US with the first large painting of Jesus the Christ as an African and founded the Shrine of The Black Madonna.

Meantime, the lack of context and the dry desert of facts about an incident just 40 years ago seem impossible for many to realize. This port city once a French, British and now American dominated location has always had Africans resisting the captivity and cruelties of racism. Canada was a refuge for more than tens of thousands of 1800s refugees. Detroit was the staging ground to get out of America.

Concerning the riots, or the 1967 revolt and its effects unto this day, there has to be some sensible reasoning: retaliation occurred and shapes much of what Detroit is now.

23 July 2007
From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002

References:

1. Untold Tales, Unsung Heroes: An Oral History of Detroit’s African American Community, 1918-1967 (African American Life Series)
2. Turning Point: The Detroit Riots of 1967, a Canadian Perspective
3. Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency:The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (American Sociological Association Rose Monographs)