The UCLCA office was raided by the vice squad at 3:30am, and it took over an hour for enough paddy wagons to come out to Twelfth Street to haul away all eighty five partiers. By that time, a crowd estimated at over 200 people gathered, and as bottles started crashing into cop cars, the police fled. Within hours over a thousand people were on the streets, and by mid-day the state police, unable to contain the outburst, had asked Governor George Romney to call in the National Guard. Over one thousand arrests were made that day, but it took the combined force of the National Guard along with the 82nd Airborne to restored "order."
The trouble burst on Detroit like a firestorm and turned the nation's fifth biggest city into a theater of war. Whole streets lay ravaged by looters, whole blocks immolated by flames. Federal troops--the first sent into racial battle outside the South in a quarter of a century--occupied American streets at bayonet point. Patton tanks--machine guns ablaze--and Huey helicopters patrolled a cityscape of blackened brick chimneys poking out of gutted basements. And suddenly Harlem 1964 and Watts 1965 and Newark only three weeks ago fell into the shadows of memory. Detroit was the new benchmark, its rubble a monument to the most devastating race riot in U.S. history--and a symbol of domestic crisis grown graver than any since the Civil War.
Events ended with 43 dead, 1189 injured. Almost 80% of the dead were black, and almost all were shot by police or Guardsmen, not hurt by civilians. Detroit, my hometown, was never the same.
--
Music today. Minutemen, about Detroit, then two from Detroit.
Minutemen - Maybe Partying Will Help
Gil Scott-Heron - We Almost Lost Detroit
Bettye Lavette - Down To Zero
His Name Is Alive - Write My Name In The Groove
