Detroit, a city that went black in 1973 with the election of a black mayor and never, ever looked back, saw the unleashing of a black wave of violence eerily reminiscent of the one taking over America since Barack Obama took power in 2009:
The summer of 1976 was shocking even by Detroit standards. Looting of downtown stores became an everyday sport – not something reserved for special occasions. In on struggling neighborhood in the northwest of town, shopowners reported replacing plate-glass windows as often as twice a week. Black and white, shopmen and customers, in big department stores and mom-and-pop grocers: among the few businesses remaining inside the city line, no one was spared. Against this background of daily robberies and muggings, a handful of particularly grisly individual crimes stood out. A popular community priest was robbed and brutally murdered in his rectory. A legal aid lawyer’s leg was broken when an auto thief ran over him in his own car. But most terrifying – and relatively new to most whites – were the teenage gangs that flourished that summer. Groups called the Bishops and the BKs (short for Black Killers) waged open warfare in the neighborhoods. They also ventured occasionally into the central business district to prey on suburban shoppers and one evening rampaged through the expensive Pontchartrain Hotel. Coming by chance on a private party, 20 youths tore through the opulent dining room, overturning tables, stealing pursues and screaming, “Black killers! Black killers! It’s all about the Black killers!
In truth, whatever happened now, the damage had been done – to Detroit’s image, its hope for economic revival, its chances for sharing in the prosperity of an integrated region. White perceptions of the city, already soured by 1967, would never recover from the summer of 1976. (p. 333-336)
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-summer-of-1976-from-ashes-of-white.html
In September of 1976 I turned 17 years old and began working for my father at Spider Staging Sales ... on Wyoming Avenue. My father was one of the few white business managers who chose to stay in the city. I took the John C Lodge freeway to work. At that time, those gangs were driving up and down the Lodge, shooting whole families in their cars. If they saw someone pulled over, they pulled over, and if it was anyone white, they shot "em all dead and drove off. The state police had to patrol the freeway for the explicit reason of stopping the gang murders. It was white genocide, it was intentional, and it worked. That's what created the concentric circles, that's how a city that had a black minority became 90% black in a matter of a couple of decades. The white people didn't want to leave their beautiful houses, so they had to be driven from the city at gunpoint. The message was clear and everyone who lived in Detroit heard it; whiteys leave now or be shot. ALL the whites moved out. Only the Arab population stayed... armed to the teeth. Most people have no idea what really happened in Detroit. Coleman Young destroyed a beautiful city, trashed and burned it, and left it in complete financial chaos. He was a radical black panther from the streets and they elected him to 5 staight terms, there was nothing left of Detroit business community by the time he left.
I'm no skinhead, I grew up there, and I lived in the city limits of Detroit, I worked downtown, I went to buildings and power plants and auto factories all over the city, I can remember chatting with a young black man in east Detroit about 22 years ago, he had ran out into the street and struck up a conversation with me, a real nice kid of 18 years... I asked him why he was so anxious to meet a complete stranger, he replied, "because you are the first white person I've ever seen in my life."
The '67 riots were probably the fiercest street fighting in American history. The black panthers were armed to the teeth and ready for a fight. The mayor had to ask for the state militia, and they were driven back, finally the heavy armor was rolled in, halftracks, 50 caliber machine guns, it took 30 days to gain control of the battle ground: ten city blocks along 10th Avenue that were utterly burned to the ground, nothing survived. The city rebuilt 10th Avenue and renamed it Rosa Parks Blvd. They then Rosa Parks her own house, and she lived out her years in that free house. Once, Rosa was robbed by some stupid kid who didn't know who the old lady was, that created quite an uproar in the black community.
Downtown, the panthers built their symbol, a black raised fist; it is supposedly Joe Louis' arm, but everyone knows what it is. It is their city now and they are trying to bring it back, but the economic tsunami that wasted Detroit was devastatingly thorough, Michigan went from the richest state in the nation to the poorest state in the nation... the city that out produced Berlin in WWII is now a manufacturing wasteland, they still have the armory, which still makes the best tanks in the world, but those two old auto plants are bound to close at some point; and the sad part of this bankruptcy is the arts; Detroit has a world class art collection in her museums and those works are owned by the city, which means they will need to be liquidated for the bankruptcy; that's like telling a rich lady to strip and taking her fine clothes and jewelry; it is the final humiliation for what was one of the finest cities in the world, people came the world over to enjoy our ethnic festivals downtown; it was a trip rewarded to new couples on the Dating Game and other tv shows; Michigan used to be #1 vacation spot in the nation.... Detroit was an opulent city, rich in culture and history, as old as the east coast cities, but it was pillaged badly, all the finest stores that lined Woodward Avenue were robbed into moving out; Hudsons used to put on the biggest fireworks in the world along the riverfront every 4th of July, I never missed those, no one did, they were free; imagine seeing the equivalent of the Bicentennial show in Washington DC every 4th of July; that was Detroit; summer in the city was fun, fun, fun if you was downtown, where all the lights were bright.
Today, if you travel into the once opulent downtown skyscrapers, it is like the slums in there, the pipework is falling to pieces, the walls are crumbling, the electricity doesn't work, the heat doesn't work, not RenCen, but all the old buildings; Detroit built them back in the day when NYC was going up; imagine this, my father outsold NYC Spider branch manager, every year, that's how much work was going on in Detroit. Now it is a city in need of a jump start. There's no love lost on Detroit, no one is going to help them, they will have to take the skewering from the Governor, and start over. Detroit was taken over by animals that now has handed their destruction to their kids, and the kids are trying real hard, but their parents fucked them over something fierce.