Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 - 1:43 pm:

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On the night of Saturday, July 22, 1967, the Tenth Precinct “cleanup squad” consisting of Sergeant Arthur Howison and three patrolmen was cruising along Twelfth Street. The cleanup squad was the precinct equivalent of the headquarters “vice squad”—throughout the police department there tends to be an overlapping and duplication of functions between the precinct and the more prestigious “downtown.” The vice and cleanup squads were supposed to control gambling, prostitution, illegal liquor operations, and after-hours, unlicensed “blind pigs.” Officers on the vice detail were expected to close down a reasonable number of blind pigs every month. They knew that if they didn’t, they would be returned to a regular beat. Violators who were arrested were fined one hundred dollars, and the next week would be back in business. Some had been arrested as many as thirty or forty times in the revolving-door process.

The day had been warm, humid, and smoggy, and Twelfth Street—”The Strip”—was teeming with people. Miniskirted prostitutes, dope pushers, the syndicate man who provided juice (a loan for criminal activity), the armed robber who had just knocked off a cab driver—all blended into the swirl. At the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmount was a nondescript building that housed the Economy Printing Company on the first floor, and above it the United Civic League for Community Action. The police had known the United Civic League for Community Action to be the front for a blind pig ever since it had been chartered a year and a half before. Sergeant Howison had raided it the first time in February, 1966. Repeatedly, thereafter, various members of the Tenth Precinct cleanup squad had attempted to gain entrance. The rival vice squad, however, had staged the next successful raid, on June 3, 1967, less than two months previously.

At 10:30 P.M. on July 22, a half hour after the squad left the precinct station to begin its night’s work, Patrolman Charles Henry knocked on the door of the blind pig, but was refused admittance as “unknown” and suspect—he didn’t have a woman with him, he was fairly young, well dressed, and in good physical condition; all of which meant that he might be a cop. For the next five hours the four plainclothes officers busied themselves checking other tips. Usually officers on vice details knocked off about 3 AM, to return to the station and write their reports. That was the procedure followed by several other officers who had successfully busted four blind pigs during the night. But before going back to the station, Patrolman Henry told Sergeant Howison he thought he might be able to gain entry now.

At 3:34 A.M. vigilance at the blind pig had wilted, and Henry was able to walk in behind three women. Ten minutes after Henry had gone inside—time enough for him to have bought a drink—Sergeant Howison radioed for the Tenth Precinct cruiser. (Another squad car also responded.) He then ordered the door of the blind pig smashed with a sledgehammer. Once inside, the police discovered the place was being used to hold a party for servicemen, two of whom had recently returned from Vietnam. Sergeant Howison had expected to find a score of people at most, but instead he discovered eighty-two! Sergeant Howison called for a paddy wagon to take them to the station.

Over an hour and four paddy wagon trips were required to remove everyone. Police Commissioner Ray Girardin was well aware that on The Strip “you can blow a whistle at three o’clock in the morning and get two thousand people on the street.” On a balmy Saturday night there was still a good deal of vehicular traffic. Cars stopped. People drifted out of all-night eating places. They looked out of their windows and came down from their apartments. About two hundred spectators gathered. Many of their comments were jocular and the mood was not “ugly.” But, inevitably, as people were herded into the paddy wagon, some were jostled by the police. A college student kept shouting: Motherfuckers! Leave my people alone!” The rumor spread that the police had manhandled a woman. There was a general air of resentment against police vice activity—an activity that was looked upon by the black community as being directed discriminatorily against Negroes. As the last police car left the scene at five o’clock, an empty bottle smashed against its rear window. A litter basket was heaved through the window of a store. Rocks were thrown. In a few minutes the police returned to the area. A lieutenant was struck by a brick.

Within fifteen minutes all of the officials in the department were notified. At twenty minutes past five the telephone rang at Girardin’s home, and he was told. By six thirty burglar alarms set off by broken windows were awakening residents of a half dozen blocks on Twelfth Street, and police officials were gathering at the musty police headquarters on Beaubien Street. Ten minutes later the Tactical Mobile Unit, the first formed in the country for just such an emergency, mobilized some of its eighty men. The night shift was held over, and the day shift for all of the West Side precincts was called to duty an hour and a half early. (They were due at 8 A.M.) It was the two hundred sixty-sixth anniversary of the day on which Cadillac had first stepped ashore on de trois; but by nightfall, July 23 would be better established as The Day of the Blind Pig.

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Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 - 2:26 pm:

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Pamequs, you mentioned that your family sold after the riots? I have read other posts about people moving after the riots.

Did this cause a panic for homeowners to sell as well as a drop in the price of houses? I guess with people moving out further that could make for houses being abandonded and neighborhoods going down.

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Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - 8:28 am:

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The world of the Black American is different from that of the white American. This difference comes not only from the segregation imposed on the Black, but from the very nature of Blackness and its evolution under segregation.

In his constant encounters with the white American's world, the Black American has had basically two responses: resistance to the white world or assimilation into it.

The attempts of the Black American to be assimilated into the mainstream have been systematically frustrated. However, whenever a few Blacks have emulated the ways and manners of white America, reflected her values (a process known as success), these individuals are projected as models that the race should imitate. Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, Ralph Bunche, and many others are pointed to by whites as Blacks who are "a credit to the race." A few are always allowed to make it so that the remaining millions will be pacified and will try a little harder to be good citizens, i.e., not giving white folks any trouble.

But this is only the view from one seat in the outhouse. At the same time there have been those Black Americans who have resisted white America and sought to convince as many as possible of what they knew. These were the field niggers during slavery, Nat Turner, the Black abolitionists, Garvey, and in our own time, Malcolm, the hustler on the corner and the high-school dropout. They have never been considered a "credit to the race" and one does not learn about them in public school. They are the ancestors of today's angry children of Malcolm X whose rallying cry is Black Power.

Those who advocate Black Power today are not isolated "extremists" as the press and the powers that be want us to believe. They are the inheritors of a proud tradition of resistance to America and what it stands for.

Blacks can see very clearly that America is a nation built upon inhumanity. The signers of the Declaration of Independence put down their quills to go home and beat their slaves. Blacks have heard the noble words, while the whip shredded the skins of their backs.

It is no longer possible to hide from public view the resistance struggle that Blacks have constantly waged inside America. The smoke from the fires of Detroit singed every white eyebrow and the message was clear: To die in the attempt to humanize America is preferable to being an American as America is now constituted. ..... [Julius Lester, Ph.D.]

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Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - 12:25 pm:

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Yeah I defineatley see a 101 patch on the shoulder on one of those paratroopers...

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Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 - 12:37 pm:

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I too have never seen any pictures of "tanks" on the streets as everyone claims, and I always thought they were mistaking these armored personel carriers for tanks, but if Frank remembers them, I'll take his word for it.

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