Coming Soon.
Letter from Detroit.
Colin,
My family moved from South Carolina to a small trailer park in Dearborn, Michigan in 1949, part of the Great Migration from the south. In 1952, we moved to Highland Park, where my first grade class was all black, but me. That is where I had my first fight, and won.
We moved the next year to Brightmoor, a poor white, working class neighborhood in northwest Detroit, which had no blacks at that time. The black-white line was Livernois, a street running north-south cutting the west side of the city in half. I never much thought about blacks and stayed on the west side of Livernois.
In the summer, we saw blacks at Edgewater, an amusement park on 8 Mile Road, Brennan Pools in Rouge Park, the State Fair, and at Kent Lake in Kensington Metropark. We stayed away from them and stopped going when it got hot and they came out in large numbers.
In the summer of 1967, I was living in Detroit, attending Wayne State University full time during the day, and working full time nights at Burroughs Corporation in Plymouth, Michigan.
I heard nothing about riots breaking out on Sunday, July 23, and I went downtown to campus Monday morning, as usual. I saw some smoke, but thought nothing of it, another old house burning. Later that day, someone in class mentioned rioting and snipers and that we should get out of town.
In my car, I could see more smoke (Wayne State was about a mile and a half from the epicenter on 12th St.) and listening to the radio, I heard stories of rioting, looting, burning buildings, and black snipers shooting white people driving in their cars. By the time I got back home to Brightmoor, the neighbors had moved their cars to block off all but one entrance to our street. They were armed with hunting rifles and stopping each car for identification. I figured it was game on for a full out race war. We slept with our rifles near at hand for days.
Soon, my parents and in-laws dumped their homes at huge losses and moved out of Detroit. I joined the Navy in January 1968 and left Detroit, but black violence was never forgotten.
Like the Islamic War that they pretend does not exist, politicians and their media pals will not acknowledge we have been fighting an active Black War for half a century. Your books identify some of the battles and the war is becoming clearer.
