Detroit After the Tragedy
Rosenberg, Bernard
Flying back to Detroit, it dawned on me that in these riotous times you can go home again. I was prepared for lots of deja vu. From chaos to chaos, what's a twentyfouryear interval? In my...
...Can the cops do no right...
...Mayor Lindsay took personally to the streets of East Harlem and used a modified Tampa technique to prevent anarchy...
...At least as much as cherry pie and violence, it's the American way...
...The cops stood around on Twelfth Street, providing passive encouragement when not actively egging people on to further depredations...
...Look at Twelfth Street, the jumping heart of a black ghetto where corruption makes it possible for vice, drug traffic, gambling and after-hours drinking to flourish...
...On the other side, we behold an assortment of Birchers, deliberately emulating the Communist party apparatus by organizing under several fronts like the Catholic Laymen's League...
...Zealots distribute handbills before these meetings, which so far attract 700 to 2,000 people at a time...
...Girardin points out that "It is one thing to shoot back at snipers, and it is another thing to shoot down a child who is looting a pair of shoes or even a television set...
...So hasty was their disposition that weeks and months later, authorities could not locate them...
...collective hypnosis spreads, social constraints dissolve, and finally, de-individualization, which is to say, total dehumanization, takes place...
...but they proceed ordinarily according to a ritual that makes arrest inconspicuous...
...They are given saturation publicity and network exposure on TV (including a notorious "documentary" which exhibited a disguised Negro prisoner, one party to the "conspiracy" that not even J. Edgar Hoover could find...
...Figuratively speaking (literally too, but that's an other story), the raid constituted pro vocation to fire by fire-fighters in a highly combustible area...
...You disperse the crowd by any of many familiar means, and you restore the rules that frenzy has shattered...
...Isn't that interesting...
...It used to boast of having the largest and loudest symphony orchestra in America...
...Five cents would also be more...
...The New York Times, to its great credit, kept asserting that the loss was upward of $200 million, thereby only exaggerating by upward of 100 per cent...
...Before long, Negroes are going to control the inner city they now so densely populate, with black Commissioners, a black Common Council, a black mayor...
...As democratic socialists, we can only feel remorse for the victims of brutality and immorality...
...By preserving its present posture, the nation may drift into more and more desperate violence...
...its abuse is increasingly dangerous...
...Yet the ineffable Irving Louis Horowitz has already declared in Transaction that a majority of the Detroit rioters did not belong to the underclass...
...Is it too much to claim that all this was police provocation...
...He objects to having his men licensed as public executioners blamelessly inflicting capital punishment on young people for their minor misdemeanors...
...When the self has been submerged in an active crowd, it needs to be rescued and revivified...
...At this writing the riot has not fully subsided...
...A certain number of men and women have been temporarily lost somewhere in the system...
...If you are interested in ending a riot, you try to break the spell which has created a beast that is somehow more than, and different from, the sum of its parts...
...In explosive social situations, any untoward event can precipitate the first phase of a riot...
...They can then be left to "stew in their own juice," politically impotent as metropolitan areas are declared to be the new electoral units...
...For a long while the cops did not shoot in Detroit, and they were damned...
...They should have nothing to do with serious interracial conflicts...
...In a rerun of 1943, the Detroit riot stopped as soon as federal troops arrived...
...but police behavior, however savage, seems to have been examplary by comparison with that of the National Guard...
...White suburbia would live in tranquility...
...Surely the educated guess—$70 million to $100 million—is appalling enough...
...Although so far neglected by General Sarnoff, it has not gone unnoticed in the local newspapers, which do, however unintentionally, contribute to a vigilante spirit that is descending on white Detroiters...
...Each department in its way was wrong, and both deserve to be damned...
...Alfred McClung Lee, co-author of Race Riot, the definitive account of that sanguinary affair, tells me that he feels sure many more corpses were never found...
...It looks that way...
...Bayard Rustin correctly holds that when you have inflammable material, who drops the matches on it does not much matter...
...Never mind how many are accused of nothing more serious than violation of curfew...
...Can he so much as define his terms or explain his sample...
...Or, "When the snow falls, it'll melt right away 'cause we're gonna make this city so hot, baby...
...Not even Watts could match old Detroit...
...I leave Detroit with a sigh of relief, playfully suggesting to my friends that they hand the whole place over to de Gaulle who might make just claim to it as an old French territory...
...No blacks...
...But by and by all those who were snagged will be "studied" as relentlessly as they will be interrogated...
...On one side Black Power militants have come more than ever to the fore...
...And then what...
...If you do not have enough guns, "Sign up with the National Rifle Association...
...As soon as the immediate cause of an outbreak generates and communicates steadily heightened animal excitement, a kind of contagion develops and the ghastly "circular reaction" goes into motion...
...Over half a milion Negroes live in the city...
...Paramilitary police could patrol the inner city's perimeters...
...But jokes do not exorcise the nightmare...
...Not in the press which puts a quietus on, or twists and distorts the few data we do have...
...That money was more than government at any level has spent or plans to spend on rehabilitation...
...Within 48 hours, another 1,100 or so were dismissed without charges...
...This nightmare is almost upon us...
...Who loots, when given half a chance to do so with impunity, during a natural or a man-made calamity...
...The culprits are warned, and the paddy wagon pulls up in an alley...
...Except for a farcical anti-riot bill, the repressive legislation we feared has not materialized...
...Flying back to Detroit, it dawned on me that in these riotous times you can go home again...
...Clever rulers probably always knew it...
...Milling, at first aimless, gradually focuses on single objects or simple symbols...
...As of early October three snipers are under arraignment, two white Southerners and one local boy, also a paleface...
...For all that, if Detroit is paradigmatic— and I think it is—one more round of madness will be fatal...
...For this summer the official figure is 43 dead, but Congressman Conyers claims his count is closer to 100...
...In that case, the New Left will be only a little less ecstatic than the Troglodytic Right...
...But where have you read about it...
...In my home town, where I was born and half bred, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then again—as tragedy...
...They could foment or suppress riots, "intuitively" and delicately manipulating the individual by destroying his critical self-consciousness...
...For complicated reasons that had to do with insurance coverage as well as politics, bureaucracy, and character deformation, it just took them forever to get there...
...The network of reactionary whites eager to capitalize on every backlash sentiment and exploit every new fear that grips previously moderate citizens, is generically known as Breakthrough...
...I am afraid -the answer is: American apartheid, or precisely the fate that Gunnar Myrdal sees in store for us, unless we start thinking in trillion dollar terms about the extirpation of domestic poverty...
...but Ohio is wide open, and Toledo— known in my time only for its multiplicity of whorehouses and gambling joints—provides a convenient arsenal...
...At the meetings, policemen, firemen, and military officers, usually veterans, all in civilian clothes but clearly identified by occupation, demonstrate the use of guns...
...The suspicion that they wanted a fire and that they want a bigger one next time, partly to show up their enlightened Commissioner and their liberal mayor, but largely out of psychotic hatred, will be hard to dispel...
...Ray Girardin, the Police Commissioner since 1963, is both intelligent and humane...
...Uniformed, teen-age, trigger-happy kids armed with submachine guns: these are the National Guardsmen out patrioteers exalt...
...Washington made an immediate down pay ment on the golden flow of funds available for research, liberally distributed among various psychiatrists, sociologists, and other "behavioral scientists...
...Why overstate the destruction and understate the slaughter— if not to make Negroes look worse and Guardsmen look better...
...Work for an enormously expanded Freedom Budget...
...What to do when hostility comes near the boiling point could be seen this year in Tampa (of all places) where white-helmeted semi-delinquent Negro kids went out to cool their hotheaded friends...
...The police function must be radically reconsidered...
...Property can be restored, but not life...
...It will add immeasurably to the confusion...
...They too got scooped up and dragged off to permanent or makeshift houses of detention...
...Next time we bit people, not just buildings...
...The handbills ask, "Are you going to let the Rap Browns take over...
...The mass media, with their heavy complicity, systematically underplay death, almost all of it (as before, as ever) directly traceable to various custodians of law and order...
...Breakthrough meetings occur in different neighborhoods all over the city...
...Their inflammatory utterances get wide currency...
...Also, they are arming, with what and by how much, nobody knows...
...If not, then, "Come and learn how to use your guns...
...The police force in Newark by overreacting and the police force in Detroit by underreacting until it was too late, failed to follow any part of this prescription...
...Three cops are under indictment, two for murder and one for conspiracy...
...When will public officials learn the elementary facts of crowd behavior...
...Printing Office issued a report on police attitudes toward Negroes...
...the others were released en route...
...This time they were not warned, the paddy wagon pulled up in front, some violaters resisted, the operation was clumsy, and 83 people got rounded up— of whom 81 were immediately released...
...Detroit, Cadillac, Vive la France Exterieure and all that...
...Pay-off or no pay-off, raids do take place...
...We learn at third hand from those privy to this document (for the report disappeared days after publication and remains unavailable) that racists were defined as policemen who consider Negroes to be subhuman...
...The 1913 riot that swirled around me and my fellow students at Wayne University resulted in 38 known deaths...
...Fire bombs are still being thrown...
...It worked...
...Rifles are easy to buy in Michigan, guns are not...
...Why, anybody and everybody...
...Let us recite the ABC's once again...
...They will be questioned, probed, tested, analyzed, and observed...
...What to do as we pick up the pieces of an increasingly heavy burden...
...They, far more than anyone else, were the killers in Detroit...
...The town is tense, with whites and blacks polarized, communication virtually at a standstill, and despair mounting to an all-time high...
...And no one will worry overmuch about the question of their representativeness...
...More such nonsense will come pouring off computers and out of ideologues' mouths...
...Approximately 5,400 reached precinct stations...
...Spread out over an area greater than New York City, Detroit does things on a large scale...
...At the same time if riots start, they need not be allowed to run their course...
...At last, an apocalypse, a real showdown...
...And the civil rights movement, currently thought to be dead or dying, will be buried for good and all...
...So say apparently trustworthy eye witnesses...
...Far from being therapeutic for anyone, interracial violence in the United States is intrinsically repugnant, inexpedient, and inimical to the interests of all concerned...
...Redouble our efforts to achieve Negotiations Now before the senseless war in Southeast Asia drains us of all our strength...
...Professor Leonard Moss estimates that from 20,000 to 25,000 persons were involved in the riot...
...And struggle tirelessly for integration, lest we be reduced to a single option, which is disintegration, for ourselves and all the world...
...You act not by shooting from the hip, which puts overheated emotions in a pressure cooker and exacerbates, as it stimulates, retaliatory action...
...Of these 7,000 were arrested...
...And New York once again, providentially, perhaps miraculously, proved instructive: minimal damage occurred in '43 under the firm control of Mayor LaGuardia, a colorful and courageous little man who, in an open car, toured Harlem as it began to erupt...
...The remaining 4,000-plus face a double ordeal: adjudication in the court room and scrutiny by social scientists...
...Neither do you sit back and simply observe a fatal sequence of stages as the "carnival spirit" degenerates into uncontrollable mayhem and murder...
...Unchecked, the crowd soon reaches a point of no return to sanity...
...neither has the libe ral legislation for which we hoped...
...Some, when they were caught in a dragnet on the hottest day of the year, had just returned from nearby beaches, still dressed in swimming attire...
...A new and fairly numerous breed has appeared, composed of men who call themselves "confrontationists...
...July '67 was July '43 all over again, only worse...
...Then ask yourself if it is possible to absolve an inspector about to retire from the force who orders a Sunday morning (2:00 A.M., July 22) raid on a blind pig...
...their presence, more impartial than martial, did the trick both times...
...Educated laymen have known this much since the pioneer formulations of Gustave LeBon, Sigmund Freud, and Robert Park...
...As Detroit goes, so goes all of urban America...
...Having said so much, with a good deal more left unsaid in the form of detail which any decent journalist could have picked up as easily as I did, let me recoil a bit...
...Nevertheless, while that material lies around, we ought to keep an eye on every match dropper...
...Well, many Negroes and some whites looted...
...Whether restrained or unleashed, these ignoramuses in blue are callous and irresponsible...
...Recently the U.S...
...Mischievous inferences have been drawn from this summer's riots over which Left-Right and Black-White extremists rejoice...
...Not one of them fired a shot on either occasion...
...The work, containing results of a national survey undertaken by consultants to the Crime Commission, indicated that a majority of policemen are racists...
...In '67 the swarming metropolis was fortunate enough to have a charismatic square in charge...
...The cops shot in Newark, and they were damned...
...Detroit is a turning point: "them niggers" will never again be "rewarded for their lawlessness...
...If the black and white confrontationists have their way, Detroit will set another record by staging two succesive riots without much of a lapse between them...
...Everyone "knows," for it has been endlessly repeated, that property damage in Detroit ran from half a billion to a billion dollars...
...Above all, you act quickly...
...A bigger, bloodier confrontation in Detroit, despite all that city has going for it, despite rational and devoted leaders, despite the UAW— just one more massive riot, and we will face the worst crisis in American history...
Vol. 14 • November 1967 • No. 6
