Monday, July 23, 2012

July 23, 1967: OVER-Zealous police in Detroit, Michigan, raid an after hours drinking club in a predominantly black neighborhood around Twelfth Street (Now Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount Avenue…


July 23, 1967: OVER-Zealous police in Detroit, Michigan, raid an after hours drinking club in a predominantly black neighborhood around Twelfth Street (Now Rosa Parks Boulevard) and Clairmount Avenue…
 



When local people turn up outside the club to protest at the heavy-handed police action, a riot is sparked. Looting and fires spread through the Northwest side of Detroit, then cross over to the East Side, and the city remains under National Guard control well into August….





 



The story of the riots is told in 
John Lee Hooker's song  
The Motor City Is Burning..










The MC5, were also caught up in the Police/Army Riot…

They did a version of Motor City Is  Burning…


But ya know what? 

The Motor City came back!



 

 For one thing,  The Tigers WON the 1968 World Series…


And Marvin Gaye sang The NationalAnthem!!!  
 
Made in the Motor City Muscle cars ruled the roads of THE WORLD!…




 




 DETROIT ROCK ‘n ROLL
  and MOTOWN SOUL topped the charts!!!
Let’s just check out the Motown stuff from 1968:

Ain't Nothing Like The Real Thing  (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell)

 

(Stevie Wonder),

I Could Never Love Another  (The Temptations)

Yester Love (Smokey Robinson)

I Care About Detroit (Smokey Robinson)

(Diana Ross & The Supremes)

 (Marvin Gaye)

The Motor City came back from the POLICE & ARMY assaults in ‘67…But a price was paid, for sure…


The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969
—Coleman Young on the aftermath of the 1968 riots…


BUT DAMN DETROIT--WE ROCK!!!




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1 comment:

geri said...

thanks Jon, these was like going down a long road of life.