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Iheartthed
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Username: Iheartthed

Post Number: 1196
Registered: 04-2006
Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 12:00 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Finally, someone is talking about it...

Today's Detroit has little to do with 1967
What if riot never happened? City was still headed for slide

July 20, 2007

BY BILL McGRAW

FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Some year, July 23 will pass in metro Detroit without reexaminations of the 1967 riot/rebellion/insurrection/ci vil disturbance.

Some year, the scratchy images of Motown's version of the Summer of Love -- burning buildings, looted stores, sniper fire, "Soul Brother" graffiti, combat-hardened paratroopers and spread-eagled young black men in fedoras and skinny pants -- will fade.

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Forgetting won't be easy, though. There are numerous books about the riot, at least one TV documentary and songs by Gordon Lightfoot, John Lee Hooker and the MC5.

The riot also looms large in the consciousness of white suburbanites; conventional wisdom is that July 1967 was the turning point in Detroit's recent history, the cause of flight to the suburbs, the breeder of all things bad about their once-beloved city, the event that kicked off Detroit's transformation from the world's greatest factory town to the struggling, impoverished city of today.

There is one question, though, that the discussion panels rarely take up: What if the events of that July never happened?

What if the police raid on that blind pig at 12th and Clairmount had gone off peacefully and Detroit had escaped the 1960s without a week in which 43 died and 2,509 stores were looted or burned?

The passage of four decades allows some perspective. And there is ample evidence that however dramatic and dreadful, the riot was not the sole turning point for Detroit.

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.

The roots of all those things were in place before the Motor City started burning.

"Many, many white Detroiters think of the riot as having caused the city's problems. It's exactly the opposite," said Kevin Boyle, a history professor and author at Ohio State University who grew up in Detroit. "The riot was a consequence of -- a manifestation of -- its deep problems."

Problems went back a long way

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.

"The riot's roots lay in unemployment, poverty and powerlessness -- all caused by an urban system that couldn't provide people with jobs, opportunity and hope," Boyle said.

Consider:

• 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. The suburbs were booming: Northland, Eastland, Wonderland, Summit Place, Macomb, Universal, Livonia and Westland malls had opened by 1967. And Warren, by some accounts, was the fastest-growing city in the nation.

• Factory closings: According to a 1961 planning study, Detroit lost about 840 manufacturing plants in the 1950s, chief among them the Packard and Hudson auto companies. During the 1950s, the number of manufacturing jobs in Detroit, Hamtramck and Highland Park dropped by 30%. Unemployment among black men ages 18 to 24 in 1967 was more than 25%.

• Retail loss: In 1961, the city's Board of Assessors reported to concerned City Council members that about 12% of Detroit's 40,460 store buildings were vacant.

• Abandoned houses: A 1961 University of Michigan study found that 22% of the dwelling units within 3 miles of downtown were empty.

• Race relations: A true race riot, in which black and white Detroiters engaged in vicious hand-to-hand combat, took place in 1943 -- 34 people died in three days. The 1950s were filled with incidents of white mobs attacking black families who had the audacity to move into all-white neighborhoods. Brutality by the virtually all-white police force was one of the black community's chief complaints in 1967.

All of these reasons are why some refer to the actions of that week in July as a rebellion instead of a riot.

If the riot had not happened, it seems fair to assume that business and resident flight would have continued, and poverty would have increased, just as in other beleaguered Rust Belt cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, St. Louis and Buffalo that did not experience riots of the magnitude of Detroit's.

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.

Detroit has a unique history. It experienced a sudden surge of growth starting in 1900 that ended with the Depression, picked up again in the 1940s and ended for good in the early 1950s. Then the city began shrinking rapidly.

J.L. Hudson Jr., the 35-year-old president of Detroit's largest department store in 1967 and a leader in postriot efforts to rebuild the city, told interviewer Sidney Fine in 1984 that the city's dizzying growth left it ill-prepared for long-term stability.

"The riots were certainly a negative, but not the sole cause of this," Hudson said.


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I'm not sure how much of the article I am allowed to post so read the rest here:

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs .dll/article?AID=/20070720/COL 27/707200367&theme=DETROITRIOT 072007&imw=Y
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Middetres
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Username: Middetres

Post Number: 7
Registered: 07-2007
Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 12:30 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

A few years back there was an article that discussed how if Detroit had won the bid for the '68 Olympics, the uprising most likely wouldn't have happened. Mexico City undercut us on costs for feeding the athletes. Otherwise we would have hosted in '68. Detroit may have been too busy preparing to host the world for the riot to have occurred, but would that have changed the underlying causes of the uprising? That's a difficult question to answer. Would enough jobs have been created and genuine coming together have occurred to diffuse the years of factory closings and increased joblessness, felt especially hard in the black community?
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Danny
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Username: Danny

Post Number: 6243
Registered: 02-2004
Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 4:42 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

If the 67'riots didn't happen. Detroit's white population would slowly continue to decrease but not accelerate. It would be like this:

1970 1,264,000

1980 1,000,999

1990 912,000

2000 988,756

The black population would increase but not too quickly.

1970 489,432

1980 502,765

1990 654,987

2000 610,756

The Mexican/Hispanic population would increase slowly but it would increase quickly after 1990

1970 21,000

1980 34,987

1990 96,908

2000 202,087

Most of jobs would be in Detroit a few would be in the suburbs. Detroit would get its first black mayor Coleman A Young. He would run until 1984 and then he would lost to a white male mayor named L.B. Patterson. By the year 2000 a lawyer named Geoffrey Feiger would become mayor of Detroit.

Detroit would experience a great rebirth by 1995 with 20 new glass covered skyscrapers filling up all of Downtown Detroit skyline. Detroit would get a its first tallest 95 story building, bigger then the REN CEN. There would be new shops, restaurants, sports stadiums, lofts and condos and single family homes. Most of the abandoned buildings are gone in the lower east and west side. Detroit Public Schools would be better than I expected and city corruption would be reduced despite more protests from the NAACP for selling the Detroit black communities out of housing and city services just to make them move to the inner ring suburbs.
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Lmichigan
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Username: Lmichigan

Post Number: 5820
Registered: 10-2003
Posted on Friday, July 20, 2007 - 5:12 pm:   Edit PostDelete Post   Move Post (Moderator/Admin Only)

Bill McGraw makes some very good points, and shows a lot of facts that most people have no idea about. I agree, little would be different.

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