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Negro Leagues players, special guests honored at Comerica Park Page C1
POWERED BY REAL TIMES MEDIA
Volume 80 – Number 45
michiganchronicle.com
July 19-25, 2017
The War on Crime, not crime itself, fueled Detroit’s post-1967 decline By Bill McGraw Detroit Journalism Cooperative
Heather Ann Thompson has been in the news recently because of the success of her new book, “Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy,” a nonfiction finalist this year for the National Book Award. But Thompson is also a nationally respected expert on mass incarceration and through her research has reached some provocative conclusions about the role Michigan’s criminal laws have played in Detroit’s slow-motion economic collapse in the decades following the 1967 uprising. For the most part, academics attribute the city’s abandonment, poverty and decay to the disappearance of high-paying industrial jobs, white flight, discrimination in housing and employment, and government decisions that favored suburban development. Thompson, though, argues that historians and others have missed an additional cause of Detroit’s unraveling: the rise since the mid-1960s of aggressive policing in black neighborhoods, along with laws that vastly increased prison sentences and the subsequent explosion of Michigan’s inmate population. That resulted in large numbers of people — mostly black males — yanked out of Detroit, orphaned children and collapsing neighborhoods. Thompson, a University of Michigan professor of history who lived in Detroit as a teenager and graduated from Cass Tech, laid out her argument in a 2013 article for the Journal of Law in Society, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” She wrote that the nation’s War on Crime “undid the crucial strides that Detroit had made when it finally desegregated its schools, its police department, and its places of work. Indeed, countless victories of the tumultuous civil rights era were ultimately undone by the rise of a massive carceral state and the realities of mass incarceration.” The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. In the mid-1960s, crime appeared to be rising in Detroit, homicides were ticking up, then 1967 happened. Crime became a big issue, and in 1974, Detroit Mayor Coleman Young took office and homicides hit an alltime high, 714. A lot of people see crime as one of the major reason people left Detroit. You have a different explanation. I think across the nation, the idea is that cities are emptied out, particularly of their white residents and their more affluent residents because crime goes out of control. And certainly Detroit is seen as ground zero where that happened. But as a historian, I had the chance to really go back
See WAR ON CRIME page A-4
WHAT’S INSIDE
50 years later after Detroit ’67, city has opportunity to get it right
By Keith A. Owens Senior Editor
Seems like just about everyone worth a quote is weighing in on this, the 50th anniversary of the Detroit ’67 Riot/ Rebellion, and that’s probably a good thing because attention must be paid. More importantly, lessons must be learned because, as the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
COMMENTARY
And as would be expected, much of what is being said is being said repeatedly. We can’t afford to make those mistakes again. We have come a long way, but still have a long way to go. Race and racism have defined Detroit. And, of course, so many memories shared from so many who not only remember but simply cannot forget what it was like during that terrible time. The pain. The terror. The violence. The rage. All of this is important, especially at this juncture in Detroit’s history. Because now, as Detroit is said to be on the comeback trail, and as so many corporate and political leaders appear to be coming together unlike at any other time in this city’s history to rebuild one of America’s most important cities, Detroit has a unique opportunity to get this right. Perhaps a more unique opportunity than any other city in the country. In past columns and editorials, I have made a point of raining on the parade of the Resurgent Detroit. I admit this was unapologetically on purpose, because it is obvious to me that this is way too early in the show for applause,
Andre Smith photo
and anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the city’s statistics knows this. You don’t applaud when nearly half the citizenry is functionally illiterate, or when more than a third of the citizenry lives in poverty. You don’t applaud when you have a public school system that is aggressively failing our children. OK, so maybe you don’t have to wait until the job is done before starting to clap — if such a thing can ever be considered “done” — but at least hold that applause until the finish line is in sight. Detroit is in a unique position to share the wealth of its comeback — once that comeback truly happens —
with the majority of its population and not just the fortunate few. Not so much because of the goodness of anyone’s heart, or as a result of their well-meaning intentions, but because the city’s demographics make racial and socioeconomic reconciliation a necessity of future survival, let alone prosperity. In short, we will truly either rise or sink together in Detroit. There is very little middle ground available, if any. Detroit’s downtown and Midtown areas could all be gold-plated and it still would not be capable of generating enough revenue from within the confines of those pre-
report of sniping, the police group invaded the Algiers Motel and interrogated 10 black men and two white women, none of whom were armed, for an hour. By the time the interrogators left, three men had been shot to death and the others, including the women, were badly beaten.
Managing Editor
Page D-1
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'67 page A-4
Killing conspiracy at the Algiers Motel By Roz Edward
Lady L of Detroit Ink Spot talks about making her mark on Detroit’s tattoo scene
See DETROIT
Events at the height of the 1967 riot, coupled with an overwhelmed police force and terror in the streets, resulted in one of the most tragic events in Detroit’s and the nation’s history. The Algiers Motel Incident, which was chronicled in John Hershey’s 1968 book, “The Algiers Motel Incident” and now the highly acclaimed film Detroit offers a chilling account of the story many wanted to bury with the dead. On July 25, 1967, in one of the most deplorable miscarriages of justice that occurred during the 1967 riot, three young black men met their deaths under dubious circumstances at the Algiers Motel, executed by members of city, state and national law enforcement officers. Nine others were subjected to mental torture,
The dead: Carl Cooper, 17; Aubrey Pollard, 19; Fred Temple, 18. What transpired on that fateful day…
terrorized and brutally beaten. It later became known as the Algiers Motel Incident. This collective of rogue cops, Detroit Police, Michigan State Troopers, National Guardsmen, and private guards who had been directed to the scene, didn’t con-
spire, as many have believed for decades, to beat and kill guests at the Algiers. They did, however, act on the fear and panic which was the order of the day, and they did so with great and unchecked fervor. Responding to a telephoned
The five days of turmoil that left 43 people dead in Detroit was approaching the height of violence on July 25, 1967, two days into the rebellion, and the day of the most violent single incident during what is becoming known as the ’67 Rebellion. When the violence of the summer of 1967 began, a number
See ALGIERS
MOTEL page A-4