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Mrjoshua
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Post Number: 1382
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 9:04 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

TASTE

The Day the Music Died
By JULIA VITULLO-MARTIN
July 20, 2007; Page W11
The Wall Street Journal

Detroit

"A roar went up in the city of Detroit," says Martha Reeves, recalling the late afternoon of July 23, 1967, when she and the Vandellas were getting ready to sing "Jimmy Mack" at the Fox Theatre. Though the song was already a national hit, they hadn't yet performed it live in their hometown. "I never heard a roar like that before and hope never to hear it again."

It was the sound of a riot, one that began 40 years ago next week and would become one of the largest and costliest in the nation's history. The riot's immediate spark had been a rough police raid on an illegal drinking and gambling establishment. The deeper causes included decades of police abuse and discriminatory labor practices.

The burning and looting would wipe out most of the commercial streets in black neighborhoods and badly damage many of the residential areas. Over 2,000 buildings caught fire, 43 people died, over 450 were injured and some 7,500 were arrested. Businesses and houses were simply abandoned, plunging the city into a four-decade economic decline.




Smokey Robinson (right) in front of Motown headquarters ca. 1967.

Now a member of the city council representing downtown, Ms. Reeves believes Detroit is at last coming back. "We've got good development going," she says, gesturing out the window of her office overlooking the Detroit River. "We've got strong economic development bringing in tourists. Our downtown is clean and safe." Over the week that included Independence Day, Detroit was full of white, suburban-looking families, attracted by the Tigers game against Cleveland in the pristine Comerica Stadium and happily spending money in the nearby hotels, restaurants, bars and casinos.

But things are still not the same. The riots had propelled one of the greatest black economic engines the country had ever known -- Motown Records, founded in 1959 -- to eventually depart for Los Angeles. After receiving a taunting phone call that Motown would burn to the ground by Halloween, founder Berry Gordy moved most operations to a secure office building close to downtown, away from the riots he had called "a hurricane of rage."

He didn't know it then, but Motown's great days were actually over. Gerald Posner, author of "Motown: Music, Money, Sex, and Power," notes that 1966, the year before the riots, was Motown's best ever. Over 75% of its releases hit the charts in an industry in which the most successful companies averaged only 10%.

With more than 100 performing groups, nearly all black and nearly all drawn from local public schools, Motown had plowed an entirely new road to entrepreneurial success. As historian Suzanne Street, author of "Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit," argues, Motown was the first black-owned company to create and produce the musical artistry of its own community -- and then successfully sell it across racial boundaries.

Never again would black music be categorized as "sepia" or "ebony" to distinguish it from mainstream music. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, the Four Tops, Mary Wells, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and of course Diana Ross and the Supremes were local kids who turned Motown into "Hitsville U.S.A.," as the sign above Motown's headquarters read.

What's more, Motown accomplished this by deliberately making the most of Detroit's black assets. Detroit had the nation's first black-owned and -operated radio station, WCHB; the Broadside Press, one of the first black-owned publishing houses; the Concept East Theater, one of the first black theater companies in the North; and the first African-American history museum as well as one of the first African-American bookstores.

This abundance was due in part to so many black Detroiters being comfortably middle class. Black workers were grossly discriminated against in the automobile industry, but they still made far more money than in the rural South, from which so many came. And their salaries paid them enough to buy houses in fine old neighborhoods, giving Detroit the largest black home-ownership rate in the country.

And Detroit had excellent public schools that provided classical training in music and art, notes Gerald Early, author of "One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture." "Motown came about because black urban life had reached a certain level of self-sufficiency and entrepreneurial achievement," says Mr. Early, now a professor of modern letters at Washington University in St. Louis. "The achievement was based on excellent, racially segregated schools that promoted the classics, and churches where there was a lot of playing of Mozart and Handel." At her Northeastern High School graduation in 1958, Ms. Reeves sang a Mozart Alleluia.

Much of Detroit's achievement was simply wiped out in the riots. As Ms. Street notes, black record shops and bookstores were burned despite Soul Brother signs in the windows. Few small black businesses had insurance, so they closed forever. The middle class simply left, and Detroit's institutional structures could not survive its departure.

However polished downtown looks today, Detroit's neighborhoods are another story. Retail activity never returned. Even 40 years later, what should be commercial streets combine empty lots with Detroit's peculiar triumvirate of gas stations, dollar stores and check-cashing outlets, plus "party" (liquor) stores on prime corners. And so much vacant land is available that, with official city support, a group called Urban Farming has planted hundreds of acres in the former riot areas.

Most of the public housing where so many Motown stars grew up has been demolished. The Brewster towers, where all four original Supremes lived in what they've described as clean, safe housing, had been among the first projects in the country built for African-Americans. In her autobiography, Supreme Mary Wilson wrote that when her family took an apartment there in 1956, "I felt like I just moved into a Park Avenue skyscraper."

But today Brewster is considered unsalvageable. Most buildings have been closed, leaving the grounds to be patrolled by drug dealers and pit bulls. And, indeed, Detroit's crime remains at frightening levels -- with 366 murders last year, Detroit's homicide rate was 47 per 100,000 residents, over five times the national average; with 25,356 car thefts, it had a rate 4.56 times the national average.

When asked about radical H. Rap Brown's contention that her famous song "Dancing in the Street" was meant to inspire rioters, Ms. Reeves retorts: "Marvin Gaye wrote that song to quench riots, not to incite them. He didn't mean to instill anything but love." Forty years later, Detroit has still not recovered from the riots or what historian Peter Benjaminson calls the spiritual blow of Motown's defection. Where has the love gone?

Ms. Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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Johnlodge
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 9:12 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Thanks a lot, everybody back then. Thanks a lot.
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Pam
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 10:40 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

One paragraph about positive things happening now but overall still pushing the "Detroit is a hellhole" theme. Also inaccurate to say the riot is the only reason for a "four decade economic decline". It also makes it sound like the vacant land is all in the "riot areas". Where are the areas these crops are planted?
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Goat
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 11:37 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I still believe that the more Detroit turns it's eye's to the riots in the past, the more it will never be able to forge a new future.
Let it go and move on...
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Jjw
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Post Number: 387
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 11:48 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

"Over the week that included Independence Day, Detroit was full of white, suburban-looking families, attracted by the Tigers game against Cleveland in the pristine Comerica Stadium and happily spending money in the nearby hotels, restaurants, bars and casinos."

----If the city uses this as a measurement of success, it will have a long way to go!! It is kind of a weird thing for a city-councilperson to say.
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Pam
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 11:51 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

quote:

It is kind of a weird thing for a city-councilperson to say.



She didn't. That is the reporter talking. Look at where the quotation marks are.
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Jjw
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 11:55 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Ah---just reread it. thanks.
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Karl
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Post Number: 8765
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 12:40 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I'll look forward to Royce's comments on this thread after his recent diatribe on another.

While this article details predjudice and racism, it also brings light to much success by blacks in the COD - perhaps the greatest in the country. While Royce whines, many, many blacks have succeeded in this country - some wildly.

Just like whites.

But just like whites, most of us can't be Bill Gates, Frank Sinatra, or George Bush. Most blacks won't be Clarence Thomas, Tiger Woods, or Denzel Washington.

However, a few things that made Detroit great "in the day" as well as many of the burbs:

1. Fathers were in nearly every home, and nearly every home had 2 parents.

2. Kids worked - around the house, and around the town. Teens mowed lawns - their own (taught by their fathers) and often the neighbors to make money.

3. The article mentions great schools.

4. The article mentions church attendance - along with Handel & Mozart being played. Don't like it? Who does the first time - but with some exposure and education, that music inspired those Motown stars (in the 1950's, ahem)

With the crime, lack of initiative and whining, perhaps Detroit will once again arise - but if the prevailing attitudes are indicative, blacks won't be leading the charge.

I could be wrong - and frankly, hope I am.
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Janesback
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 1:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

and parents didnt put up with lip or crap from their kids. They didnt depend on schools to raise their kids, they did it themselves.
If a kid got whacked in school, I guarantee they got it worse when they came home

Most of these parents need to know the shit out of their kids when they get out of line. Maybe then the kids will know the next time they pull their attitude they'll be toast.......

Im sure I ll have a few people disagree and trash me, but I had the same happen to me when I was a kid and Im not in jail, not on drugs, do not have any illigitimate kids and I work full time and have a degree....Jane
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Royce
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 1:26 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I believe the LA Riot surpassed Detroit in the number of deaths and the dollar amount in terms of property damage.

The problem with national newspaper or magazine articles is that the person reporting can't help but misrepresent certain facts. Now, I find it hard to believe that because of the '67 riot, Motown moved from Hitsville. The HQ was in the heart of where the riot took place, true, but was it not in a predominately black neighborhood already? Were threads made by angry blacks in the neighborhood or angry whites whose stores were destroyed?

Also, is the demise of the Brewster Projects necessarily a bad thing. Public housing for the most part was supposed to serve as temporary housing until people could find something better. Clearly, the members of the Supremes and some of their families were able to move out because of their success. Why report the demise of projects as if the riot had something to do with it?

Karl, when you don't like what someone has to say you call them whiners. Man, as many times as you have posted(8765 posts) and you want to talk about other people whining. Get real.
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Atl_runner
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 1:38 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Some cities reinvent themselves on the fly through great leadership.. Detroit did a nearly complete disassemble and aside from downtown and a few other areas, will need a complete rebuild that will take some time. This could be a good thing though, provided those in charge have learned from the mistakes of the past.

It arguably took 40 years to hit bottom. It might take equally as long to get back to a state of prosperity in it's neighborhoods. What a case study that would make. Nearly a Century of downturn and revival.
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Gdub
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 2:01 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I like Bill McGraw's column better.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs .dll/article?AID=/20070720/COL 27/707200367&theme=DETROITRIOT 072007&imw=Y
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Eric_w
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 3:44 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

The words written above at the start of the thread pretty much sums it up. The riot was one of the biggest catalyst if not the biggest for Detroit's decline.
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Goblue
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 4:13 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Gdub: Thanks for the link to McGraw's comumn...its a fascinating analysis that pretty much refutes the concept that the '67 riot was the cause of the decline...likely it simply accelerated the rate of flight and decay that was already taking place. I worked in a school district in Warren immediately after college in the early '60's...at that time we were building a school a year in a district that was a total of 5 square miles...that process had been going on for about 5 years...and in my mind supports McGraw's observations that Detroit's fall had begun in the 1950's...for many complex reasons.
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Sstashmoo
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 4:27 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

I'm glad they pointed out which one was Smokey "(right)" I'd have never figured it out. Just funnin with ya..

Man those were some good days in the D. Just the music alone. A real flavor. And the aforementioned gentleman was truly one of the kings of it all. All of us kids listening to our scratchy little AM transistor radios. Then FM came out, state of the art broadcasting..lol You could still hear it under freeway overpasses. Amazing.
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Karl
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Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 6:16 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Atl-runner: Perhaps you didn't mean it this way, but I gotta give you credit - I've never heard of Detroit's "condition" referred to in your unique manner:

" Detroit did a nearly complete disassemble..."

Yup, they sure did.
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Karl
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 2:14 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Well, here we are on the 40th anniversary.

I wonder why Berry Gordy really left. Yes, I know all about Los Angeles and the entertainment industry - but I wonder how Berry would answer the question, "What would it take to get Motown to relocate back to Detroit"

I wonder what a Berry Gordy/Bill Cosby joint press conference would sound like with the subject: How to attract businesses to Detroit.
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Mike_from_gregory
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 3:27 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

In your face blacks proliferated after the riots on the west side. I remember deuce and a quarters and Caddies were the autos of choice fo the poor Black detroiters of the early 70s. The downtrodden were pimp wannabees when I left the diversity hellhole...
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Lmichigan
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 3:46 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

The Free Press and The Detroit News gave much, much more justice to this issue, last week.
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Erikto
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 10:37 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

After reading the most detailed study I've ever seen (or heard of) of this event, I am inclined to agree with Go Blue. A lot people assume everybody who wanted a decent job could get one in Detroit in 1967, but I have read there was in fact surprisingly high unemployment, including a lot of laid-off black labourers. The city's population had already began to contract, too. I've given up recommending the book on 'Riot Threads' called Violence in the Motor City (nobody here has ever backed me up on this one!), bit I will make an exception and propose this title explains a lot about the city. It's a gigantic, densely written book with lots of graphs and charts to boot, but one will come away with a couple of salient points.
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Erikto
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 10:39 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Oops, Violence in the MODEL City!
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Iheartthed
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:01 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

>Erikto

Is there any evidence that the area's leaders understand this?
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Oldredfordette
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:23 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Don't you think the tone of some of these comments proves that we haven't learned very much about race relations since 1967? The same misunderstandings and generalities abound.

Overwhelming numbers of black Detroiters did NOT participate in the events of July 1967. When will we face that truth?
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Karl
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 12:25 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

ORF, overwhelming #'s of black Detroiters now deal with each other - whether they participated in the events of July 1967 or not. Yet folks like Cosby are shunned, Berry Gordy & Co. have left for good - when do you see Detroiters facing that truth, and actively learning from it and teaching those thruths and consequences to their children?
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Oldredfordette
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 1:41 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

How do you figure folks like Cosby are shunned? SRO at his talks. Berry Gordy left for financial reasons. Which truth do you think black Detroiters should face? Your white truth or their own?
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Iheartthed
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 2:13 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

"Which truth do you think black Detroiters should face? Your white truth or their own?"

::clappin::
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Barnesfoto
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 6:36 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

If Motown Records "left because of the riots", why did they wait so long?
I've always understood that Motown Records left because the entertainment and recording industry were centered in Los Angeles. But if a "Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute" says Motown Records left because of the riots, it must be true (*snicker*)
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Detroit_stylin
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 6:37 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Even thought Motown didn't competely leave until 1984 nonetheless....

wassat about 17 years after the riot?
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Barnesfoto
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 7:03 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

It depends on whether you use real math or "sound math*(TM)
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Karl
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 10:04 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Fact is, Motown left - with all of its native Detroit talent. Is there a better company to convince to come back to Detroit? To ask to invest in Detroit, since they made their money with Detroiters born and raised HERE?

Why not ask - if for nothing more than to hear their answer(s)

Unfortunately, the current leaders (along with CAY) never thought to ask. In fact, didn't CAY oversee their departure?

And the clueless stylin's only reaction: "Wassat...?"
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Detroit_stylin
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 10:26 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Nope Karl....I just dont waste good brains cells on ignorance fucks such as yourself...

Now run along old man I think I see a young unwed pregnant teen going into an abortion clinic. Pro Life Man spring into action!
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Jimg
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:00 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Did anyone consider the idea that maybe Berry left because he saw what he wanted, and it wasn't in Detroit? Maybe he wanted the glamor, glitter, whatever, of LA. I mean, he gave Detroit "Motown" and put it on the map for evermore. How much more does he owe?
People relocate all the time - especially musicians, or music folks. Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell, Yusef Lateef...the list is mighty long. They went to NYC, center of American Culture.
Karl, for you to tie Gordy's departure to "the riots" is a real stretch, even for you. Don't you think it's ironic that you harp on Gordy for leaving when you left too? What's up with that?
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Oldredfordette
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:10 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

CAY? Who are you talking about?
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Karl
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:24 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Coleman Young, clueless.
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Karl
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:27 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Jimg, Gordy took an entire industry with him - one that put Detroit on the map perhaps as much or more than the auto industry.

Unlike Gordy, feel free to take a poll here - no one cared when/if I left.

Yes stylin, please don't waste the few cells you have left after all the abuse.
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Lowell
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:41 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Bill McGraw's captures the mood and sense of 1967 and its deeper implications better than anything I have read in ages.

I have long held that 1967 was the ton of bricks that broke the camel of Detroit's back.

A straw would have worked, instead it was bricks.

Detroit and all the factors of its decline had been set in motion for several years. 1967 simply hastened the inevitable.

quote:

Even without a riot, there is much evidence that Detroit still would be pretty much the city it is today -- still yoked to the troubled auto industry, still fighting economic decline, still shrinking, still struggling valiantly to remake itself, still achieving some successes amid the fires, shootings and poverty that are ubiquitous in 21st-Century American cities.

quote:

At one point in the 1960s, city officials were struggling to get a handle on factory closings, stem the flight of white residents to the burbs and deal with a crime wave. Time magazine reported back then that "blight is creeping like a fungus through many of Detroit's proud old neighborhoods."

The mayor blasted the story as slanted and biased.

The year was 1961. The mayor was Louis Miriani. The riot was still six years away.

Some white suburbanites like to poke fun at the way Detroit is run today. But they ignore the facts: Postwar Detroit, run by whites from top to bottom, clearly was foundering long before the first looter busted the first window on 12th Street. And the system that whites had created over the decades was discriminatory and at times brutal for the more than one-third of the city's residents who were African American in 1967.

quote:

• Suburban flight: U.S. census figures show the white population of Detroit dropped by 23% in the 1950s alone. The number of whites had plummeted by at least 500,000 between 1950 and July 1967.

What's really going on...
quote:

The crisis in Detroit's lifeblood -- manufacturing -- is a nationwide phenomenon that has nothing to do with the riot. The automakers' U.S. market share has been declining for years. It stood at 47.8% from April to June. Would the city's three automakers be better off in 2007 had 1967 been just another year in Detroit? Unlikely. There is no connection.

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Oldredfordette
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Posted on Monday, July 23, 2007 - 11:41 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Yeahhhh, Karl. Too bad there is no music industry here anymore!
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Barnesfoto
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Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 1:36 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

right, OR!
Every musician left with Berry Gordy...
It was like when Jim Jones moved the People's Temple to Guyana!
Why today, there are not even any musical instruments left in the city!
Just another tragedy like "Pol Pot killing those Vietnamese" and the "NY Times Horoscopes" that Herr Troll is always imagining.)
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Oldredfordette
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Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 1:58 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Why couldn't you call him Coleman Young, Karl? Too racist to say his name?
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Hpgrmln
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Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2007 - 4:17 am:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

By playing the race card im led to believe youre equally as racist.Typically, peopple accuse others of being racist to conveniently place the blame on someone else just to boost their own personal agenda.

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