I grew up not far from Detroit. Just 29 miles south of the center of the city. My father worked for the auto mobile industry until his retirement in 1986. Only one other event in the wider world had a greater impact on my adolescence (the Viet Nam War). And it seems that these two things are intimately related.
(From the Writers Almanac)
It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid a bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested eighty-five black men and began loading them into vans.
The riot that broke out raged for five days. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot.
Forty-three people were killed and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned, and the city's population plunged from 1.6 million to 992,000 in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America, with one in every three residents living in poverty.
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1 comment:
Your are Nice. And so is your site! Maybe you need some more pictures. Will return in the near future.
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