[News] Detroit 1967: Riot or Rebellion?

[Anti-Imperialist News]

From: Grace Boggs <glbg at sbcglobal.net>


LIVING FOR CHANGE
Detroit 1967: Riot or Rebellion?
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan  Citizen, April 8-14, 2007

What should we call those tumultuous days  in the 
summer of 1967 which began  on July 20 with 
a  raid by Detroit police on a “blind pig” at 
Clairmont and 12th St. (now Rosa Parks 
Blvd.)  and ended a week later, with more than 
1,000 buildings burned to the ground, 7000 
arrests,  43  people killed and 1189 
wounded,  mostly shot by police and National 
Guardsmen for alleged looting, sniping, and curfew violations?

As we approach the 40th  anniversary of that 
watershed week,  everyone who cares about the 
future of Detroit and other American cities needs 
to wrestle with this question.

It is not only a matter of terminology.  What we 
call that week in July  reflects how willing we 
are to accept the challenge to build a Detroit 
which is safe and sustainable because it is 
founded on the conviction that human values of 
justice and community are more important than  material and  economic growth.

When hundreds of Detroiters  on that 
steamy  Saturday night confronted  the 
police  with  violence rather than compliance, 
the police, understandably,  viewed them as lawbreakers, rioters.

On the other hand, for most black Detroiters, and 
for everyone caring about  justice,  there was 
something righteous in the response of the 
crowd.  It was a protest  against  the 
overwhelmingly white police force that, like an 
occupation army, had been routinely stopping 
blacks just walking down the street.  It was a 
standing up against the injustice that few if any 
black faces were among those running the city, 
although blacks were becoming a majority as 
whites fled to the suburbs.  It was a plea by 
black youth  not to be turned into outsiders by 
HiTech, to be recognized, not criminalized. So, 
for most Detroiters,  it was an uprising, a “rebellion.”

But the media didn’t ask the people what they 
thought.  Getting its views from the police, 
it  labeled the confrontation a “riot”  - and has 
continued to do so, despite the fact that the 
Kerner Commission, created by President Johnson 
to analyze the roots of  urban unrest, criticized 
the media for its failure “to report adequately 
on the causes and consequences of civil disorders 
and the underlying problems of race relations.”

The rebellion in Detroit was one of more than a 
hundred urban explosions, beginning with  the 
1965 Watts uprising,  in which inner city youth 
not only demonstrated  their anger against racism 
but demanded that society stop viewing them only 
as cogs, to be used and disused, employed and 
unemployed according to the needs of the economic system.

The rebellions brought blacks to political power 
in many cities and state legislatures because 
they warned the Establishment that white 
political power could no longer maintain law and order.

However, for the last 40 years, these blacks, 
enjoying political power and 
upward  mobility,  have been unwilling or unable 
to address the fears of inner city youth that an 
increasingly technological and global economy has made them expendable.

Hence school dropouts, a drug economy, crime and 
incarceration have escalated, driving millions, 
including blacks, to the suburbs – but also 
challenging everyone who cares about the city and 
these young people to create another Detroit that 
includes a productive role for them.

To meet this challenge, as Jimmy and I pointed 
out in Revolution and Evolution in the 20th 
Century (Monthly Review Press, 1974) requires 
going beyond Rebellion (or 
protest)  to  Revolution or accepting our 
responsibility for creating a more just and more caring society.

Although we didn’t know it at the time,  Martin 
Luther King Jr., having taken seriously the cries 
of black ghetto youth,  had reached a 
similar  conclusion.  We need a radical 
revolution of values, he said, not only against 
racism but against materialism and militarism. 
Instead of pursuing economic growth which robs 
people of participation, we need to expand our 
uniquely human capacity to care for one 
another.  In “our dying cities” we need direct 
action projects that  enable our young people to 
transform themselves and their environment at the same time.

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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