#like it’s socialized in everyone and is equally unfair to everyone but the misery is not distributed evenly

[femmeconomics]

when i was in elementary school, girls had to wear jumper dresses or skorts (skirts with the built in soft shorts) and like.. this did not bother me personally in the least. even once they dropped that rule a couple years later i still only wore the jumpers and skorts. but my best friend at that age was miserable. she hated dresses and hated skirts and hated that she couldn’t dress like the boys got to and even though i, personally, could not comprehend why anyone would want to wear khakis (famously the most evil fabric known to man) when they could wear a perfectly comfortable skort, i could still commiserate and understand that it was unfair that she couldn’t wear shorts like the boys. it was still a shit rule, even if i, personally, did not feel restricted by it and didn’t change my behavior once the rules were loosened.

so when i see women who are like "who cares that patriarchal femininity is oppressive and women are required to comply or face consequences — this doesn’t matter because i, personally, do not long for the alternative choices which are withheld from me" i’m like girl i could grasp this at age seven. c’mon now.

[incoherentbabblings]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Young Justice - All Media Types, Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake Characters: Stephanie Brown, Tim Drake, Cassie Sandsmark, Kon-El | Conner Kent Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Kissing, Romance, Established Relationship, Tim Drake is Drake (DCU), Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Minor Canonical Character(s), Fluff and Humor, Light Angst Summary:

Expanded scene for Young Justice (2019) #15. Tim and Steph finally get to reunite after the team’s reality hopping adventure, and whilst Tim is keen for Stephanie to be (re)introduced to his friends, Stephanie isn’t sure she belongs.

Tim watched as people piled up the big green monsters into one giant pile of unconsciousness. He was standing on top of his pickup truck; the one Stephanie had apparently driven halfway across America without even a scratch to come meet up with him.

Tim watched as she very awkwardly extracted herself from a conversation with Jackson and Derek, not sure what to say or do, and made a beeline towards Tim. He tried to control his expression as she did so. He wasn’t disappointed in her, but he had hoped she would be able to feel comfortable enough around a bunch of strangers to strike up a friendly conversation or two. At the same time, he understood. Afterall, they hadn’t really gotten their reunion yet. At least, not the one that Steph had teased about wanting.

Tim could see her slight nervousness in the way she held her shoulders as she looked up at him, face hidden under her black mask and purple hood.

“We done? No more bad guys to punch?”

Two days they’d said. Two days and they would find each other.

They’d known it was a promise neither could keep, and things had very understandably gotten out of hand, but still, Tim felt like he had disappointed her.

“We’re done.”

He reached down, tugging her up onto the roof of the truck. She didn’t need the help, but he wanted to see how readily she took his arm.

She did so immediately, without hesitation, a light laugh bubbling out as she was heaved upwards. Stephanie was deceptively light, or maybe Tim was deceptively strong. Regardless, he tugged up until she was able to twist onto the roof on her butt. She then pulled herself up to standing to be level with Tim.

She was smiling under her face cover.

“Can I take off my mask, do you think? Do you trust them all?”

“Yes,” he replied immediately. “They’re our friends Steph.”

His heart broke a little that she didn’t quite understand it yet. It was a bit of a white lie, but Tim saw no reason why it could not be the truth. They had left Gotham for many reasons, altered timelines being one of many, but another was simply the desire to go new places, meet new people, and have a life outside of the damn Bat for two weeks.

Finding his friends again, finding that safe space... He wanted Steph to find her own place within it. He had mentioned it to Cassie, Kon and Bart on the rare quiet moment during their interdimensional travels. He didn’t want there to be a hard line between his life in Gotham and life with them. He didn’t see the need. Not anymore.

Needless to say that the three of them took his thoughts very well. Yes, the four of them were finally reunited. Enough with the melodrama; be grateful that they could spend time together once more and stretch it out and milk that time for all it was worth. Remember how easily it was taken away?

Besides, it couldn’t do Steph any harm to have friends too, right? Admittedly she was a bit rough around the edges, as socially awkward as she was genuinely kind, but then again it wasn’t like the team were exactly behaving at peak social norms either. Bart alone was surely testament to that, right?

Steph was ignorant to Tim’s musings and continued their conversation.

“Good. Because,” she sang, pulling down her hood and her full-face mask off. “I need to give you that proper greeting, remember? Can’t wait any longer.”

Tim exhaled at the sight of her smile and long blonde hair, but it collapsed when she leaned in, eyes half shut.

“Wait,” he said, jerking back a little.

“What?” Stephanie asked, voice quiet and sad. Worried at the rejection, she put her hands up to rest on his chest. He flinched as she did so, and she felt like crying. “Oh no… Something happened didn’t it? Is it those memories you got back? Was I horrible in them? Because I’m really sorry if I was. I’m a different person now. Literally or metaphorically I dunno but…Or is it something that happened whilst you were away?”

She spoke with such sincerity despite the farcical nature of the statements, that Tim felt the need to put her out of her misery. He grasped her wrists and then intertwined their fingers when she raised her palm from his chest. He squeezed tight, and he saw her tremble.

“It’s not you. I didn’t keep my promise.”

“What?” Her voice shifted from upset at herself to the situation.

“You needed me. We said two days. And I tried but-but…”

Stephanie pouted at being denied affection for such a trivial reason as – as far as she saw it – losing track of time. Tim was punishing himself in that silly head of his, and by extension, it also felt so to Stephanie. She took a deep breath and mellowed out her tone.

“Stuff happens,” she responded firmly. She was not interested in a debate or Tim’s proclivity for self-flagellation. “I know you didn’t deliberately leave me hanging, so why would I resent it? Impulse mentioned reality hopping…”

Her look became worried as she drew the wrong conclusion. The confidence fled her as quickly as it had come. “Was it bad? Trauma? Where did you go? Is that where you got this outfit from because ooft honey –”

“You gave it to me.”

Stephanie paused, then tugged Tim’s hands round to hold her waist.

“I did what?” she scrunched up her eyes and face cutely, shaking her head like she was trying really hard to remember giving Tim a brown superhero suit without a cape and a yellow bat on the belt buckle. “Is it another missing memory? Because it’s so unfair that you have yours and mine are still wibbly wobbly. I’m actually a little peeved about it to be honest.”

“This costume. It was… we were…”

Like she was speaking to a toddler, she squeezed tight and said, “Start at the start. What happened after you got to Metropolis?”

Tim told her.

It was an oddly long story, and yet simultaneously brief. It was chaotic and frantic, and yet the affection with which Tim relayed the adventure with his friends made her chest warm. When he reached the misdirection of Earth Three, Stephanie’s patient and attentive expression turned a little distraught. She didn’t mind having the title of Batwoman, she didn’t mind being a good guy in a world of not good guys, but there was just the fact that…

“But you said everyone on Earth Three was evil? A flip of this earth’s morality.”

“I thought so. But you weren’t. You were good there too.”

This only served to further confuse Stephanie.

“But… but…but!” she gulped in a large pocket of air. “But that would mean this me is evil! Right? Am I evil? All this time we’ve been worrying about crazy bat you –”

“Ouch.”

“—But what if it’s me? You could have stayed and helped her right? But you didn’t. And she gave you that costume as what? A present? Something to remember her by? Oh, that’s romantic and sad. But what if this means that I’m the ticking time bomb? You could have stayed and made a huge difference, right? You could have… turned that whole place upside down and made it better for everyone. From the sounds of it, I’m sure not evil me would have been down to clown... Which, great. Now I’m gonna spend my days thinking that me getting the wrong Starbucks order is going to be my start of darkness or something equally stupid. Your friends will think I’m a lunatic...”

Her eyes darted backwards, looking at the team, chatting and oblivious. Superboy was sitting off to the side, quietly watching as everyone wrapped up their work, Wondergirl and Arrowette were catching up, whilst Impulse spoke to Jinny and Naomi. Stephanie felt abruptly ashamed and as a result shifted, almost trying to hide herself behind Tim.

With a firmness and certainty that reflected Stephanie when she had rebuked his earlier guilt, Tim pressed her cheeks together to make her face scrunch up in a pout

“You… are not evil. You never will be if I have any say in the matter. Think you’re about the least capable of it in Gotham, if not in the world. You pulled me back last month from the brink of being a monster. I’d say I’d do the same for you, but I’ll never have to. You’re not stained by the dark.”

She blinked owlishly. Tim was not often that grand and romantic (though he could be histrionic), so it made her blush to be spoken of so highly. Still, her nagging concern, an uncomfortable tightness in the pit of her belly, remained.

“You could have stayed there,” she insisted. She was holding onto the fact that Tim had returned wearing a costume and a name which had been gifted to him on another earth. A name from his alternate self and a costume from an alternate her. There was something to be dissected there right? What would a psychologist make of that tangle of identity and interpersonal relationships?

He had returned from an earth where motives were selfish, and heroes were rare. He had returned wearing a name that was simultaneously his and yet not, wearing a costume that was not hers to grant. Tim wanted more than anything to make a difference. That world was ripe for his ambition.

Tim did not even seem concerned at such a concept. For once, it seemed he had not even given the matter much thought.

“Sure. Maybe I could have stayed. She would have been happy if I had. That Stephanie didn’t have anyone to help her. She…I think she was very lonely.”

Steph sighed shakily, and Tim held her closer. He knocked his forehead against hers, and her grip went up to cradle his face. They kissed, and Tim heard and felt Stephanie’s right foot pop up.

Finally granted the kiss she had been craving for hours, Tim swallowed the sound of her whimper. Not even remotely ashamed of who could be watching, Stephanie deepened the kiss and moved closer, curving her body against Tim as she tugged at his neck, encouraging him to make it harder.

It had been too long, and Stephanie was sure she was developing a complex regarding Tim, like if she took her eyes off him for three seconds he would – for the third time in a year – be zipped off to another dimension. It was almost funny how much the two of them could apparently not stay joint at the hip as they desired, and Stephanie suspected she may have started developing some bizarre attachment disorder as a result.

Although, it was worth it for moments when they kissed like this. When Tim allowed himself to feel like a seventeen-year-old. Kissing felt good. Kissing Stephanie felt great. She always tasted of cinnamon gum and liked to hold his cheek and tug his hair and she made cute squeaks when he –

No, he couldn’t get too carried away.

Tim ended the kiss with a most content sigh, like his worries had been laid to rest forever (which was false and a lie, but he indulged in it for now), and kept his eyes shut.

“I came back,” he whispered, keeping his forehead on hers and missing how Stephanie looked a little cross eyed from the kiss. “Because I had to get home to you. I promised, even if I couldn’t keep to two days. I had to come home.”

“To me,” Stephanie breathed. Looking at him reverently, she cradled his chin and kissed him again.

“To you,” Tim confirmed. “I missed you, Steph.”

She tugged him closer, making him rest his forehead against her shoulder as she buried a hand in his hair.

“Missed you too, boy wonder.”

They embraced for a moment too long, then Tim pulled back a little to speak into her ear.

“Come on. I’ll introduce you to everyone. Properly. I’m sure Bart did a rush job of it. They already know you, which isn’t fair. You should get to know them again.”

He very distinctly felt her tremble. Fighting monsters, fine. Facing her dad down, fine. Meeting her boyfriend’s friends? Terrifying.

Tim hopped down off the truck, but held out his arms, fully intent on catching her. Stephanie looked around once more. It seemed Wondergirl and Naomi were wandering over to the truck, so she swallowed her fear. She leapt off the car, straight into Tim’s arms. He caught her easily and spun her around twice, making her laugh sharply, until using the momentum he flung her up and off. She landed on her feet with a delighted shriek, and it was with that smile on her face that Cassie reached them.

To Stephanie’s surprise and delight, she was enveloped in a warm hug.

“It’s so nice to see you again. Both of you,” Cassie said. Chin resting on Stephanie’s caped shoulder, Cassie saw Tim’s look of relief and gratitude. “You guys will stick around a bit?” she insisted, raising her eyebrows in a gentle chide.

Stephanie choked on her reply, not sure how to react. Behind her, Tim grimaced. Why was she so reluctant around his friends? Was it because she didn’t want to know them, or because she didn’t feel she had the right too?

“I… I want to,” she said, Tim watching her struggle. “But-but my dad…”

Stephanie looked over her shoulder at Tim for guidance, and Cassie broke out the hug. Seeing Stephanie’s hand reach back, Tim took it tightly. He could see in her face no disdain or dislike, just insecurity and the realisation that she didn’t know how best to say her father was a pressing issue without seeming like a haughty holier than thou girlfriend.

Paradoxically, Tim relaxed. That angle was much easier to deal with. It simply was that Stephanie was nervous, and unsure of what her place was in the team. They had their memories of each other back. She held no such memories. She felt locked out, and undeserving.

How to make her understand…

“We have one loose end to tie up at our end,” Tim explained. Playing with Steph’s fingers, he had a sudden thought as a solution. “After though, how about the fact that we’re gonna need to see if the place in Rhode Island is still standing? The team should be able to use it again.”

“Huh?”

Cassie chuckled at Steph's confusion, and smiled broadly at the thought of returning to Mount Justice.

“You’ll love it Spoiler. Better than living out the back of a truck, believe me.”

Stephanie seemed bemused, like she had just suspected Cassie of mocking her but also not hearing any genuine insult in the dig at her current living circumstances.

Cassie wasn’t mocking her. She didn’t have a passive aggressive bone in her body and was not capable of being underhand. She was only trying to gently tease, as a friend would do.

Not that Stephanie knew that, but still, Tim’s heart stuttered for her.

Tim kissed Stephanie’s cheek and explained, “It was Young Justice’s home away from home. There’s a whole headquarters up there. An old Justice League site.”

“We appropriated it,” Cassie said. Her eyes were patient and encouraging. Stephanie, meanwhile, still did not understand.

“That’s cool,” she said politely. Tim sighed good naturedly, exasperated at her obtuseness.

“Stephie,” Tim moaned as she burned red from the pet name in front of his friends. He jerked his head at Conner, begging his direct nature to intercede.

“Whu—”

Endlessly patient, Tim stated, “It’s gonna be your home away from home too. If you want it to be. It can be all of ours again.”

She could not reply, as she was then embraced in a bear hug courtesy of Superboy. Cassie smirked, then called for the others to come gather. Tim held onto Stephanie’s fingers, and watched carefully what Conner did and spoke. Tim had seen that melancholy look from earlier as Conner had watched the team.

Tim knew Conner was feeling a little out of place, but he was grateful that he had put it aside to help Tim and welcome Stephanie. Hidden to Stephanie, he mouthed a thank you in Conner’s direction, who responded by wiggling his head in smug satisfaction.

Stephanie remained oblivious, her only thought as she endured the hug was at the blatant display of strength and control that the clone displayed. She grunted when he squeezed the bear hug tighter but found herself smiling all the same. There was only genuine joy and laughter in Conner’s voice as he teased.

“Hey, we finally got the lovebirds in the same room again, huh? It’s been a while, Spoiler, even if Tim says you don’t remember.”

When he set her down, she returned to Tim, holding his hand still. She didn’t understand why Superboy saying such a thing made the pit of nerves in her gut settle, but the warmth that bloomed in her chest made her smile until her cheeks hurt.

“I’m sorry I don’t. Remember, that is.”

Conner shrugged, “Hey, we’re still young. Gotta lifetime to fix that. Or make new memories. Or both.”

Tim’s hand snuck round her waist, and he pressed his cheek to her temple.

“We’ll deal with your dad. Then we’ll go home?”

“Home?” Stephanie asked.

“Second home,” he quantified.

Looking at the friendly faces surrounding the pair of them, Stephanie smiled awkwardly and nodded.

A home away from home sounded…nice.

[jj-ktae]

Papers, III

Title : Papers Pairing : Park Jinyoung x Fem!Reader Genre : Victorian Era, Romance, Fluff, Angst, smut-ish, Words : 4881 Summary : In the merciless 1850′s, Park Jinyoung finds solace in tiny pieces of paper and their owner.

Will be updated every Wednesday at 9 p.m CEST. (I will probably have to change the schedule because of tumblr.)

Thank you @jaebeomsmullet​ for the amazing banner ! 

Prologue - I - II - 

III, 

You feel odd. Your encounter with that gentleman is still printed into your head, the words repeating and causing a whirlpool of unusual anxiety.

Why did he sound so indignant? What caused such a hatred toward rich people when he obviously studies in an expensive school?

Maybe he is one of these rebellious kids, preaching peace and equality around the country. You’ve seen them in your neighbourhood, all kind and sweet with people like you who “are as deserving as the rest of the population”. They are usually from wealthy families and try to fight for what they think is right.

Maybe he is studying while fighting inequalities.

Vivienne quickly kills your theories as soon as you go back to work the next day. No one seems to mention the incident, even though you both came back home feeling paralysed from shock. You thought you were going to be yelled at, but it is like nothing happened.

“Aunt told me there are students who aren’t rich. It is now common for rich people to do charity.” She explains. Her arms are getting sore from the intense scrubbing in the offices but she works harder, eager to get it over with. “She mentioned it is usually directed toward homeless children.”

You stop sweeping the solid oak floor, head tilted to the side. “These people help random children in the streets? Why would he hate them, then?” It doesn’t make sense, this gentleman sounded like he was about to burst.

“I thought so too…” Vivienne continues, before taking a deep breath and stretching her arms. “but then Aunt said these actions were not made upon real kindness of heart.”

You aren’t surprised.

You finish working quietly, your mind troubled with theories about who that gentleman could be. Your peacefulness isn’t as lovely as what you predicted and upon realising your mind cannot forget about him, you enter yet another room.

--

Jinyoung is unable to erase the memory. It is so unlike him to lose his temper. He knows himself, he knows he can be choleric but control had always been his strongest weapon, especially in that jungle they call society.

At the same time, he hates having to keep himself composed.

“That is a very barbaric way to greet a young lady.” Jaebeom utters. He lifts his head to peak at his silent friend before leaning against the wall.

Jinyoung snorts, eyes opening to find a rotting ceiling. “You are unbeatable at consoling people.”

“You tend to function with admonishment. If no one tells you where to stop, I’m afraid you’ll end up killing someone with your hatred, Jinyoung.”

Jinyoung knows. His anger is swelling along the years, probably because with age comes realisation. What was unfair back then is unbearable now. He turns around abruptly from his spot on the dirty couch, his face aiming for Jaebeom’s composed presence. “She looked exactly like we used to when we were frightened of being beaten to death. You should have seen it, how she was expecting me to destroy her whole existence with the back of my hand. Is this what life is supposed to be about?”

Jaebeom thinks for a minute and almost seems moved; he knows too much about that fear he has yet to exorcise.

But he shakes his head, too slowly to announce he is going to agree. “Only us are responsible for our fortune. No one is going to take us out of here. Charwomen and maids have enough to do, they do not need you to add to their misery.”

“How are you suddenly taking everyone else’s side?” Here it comes again, the wrath. Jinyoung has no idea how it became to uncontrollable.

“Jinyoung, I am on your side. I, too, have been beaten, have lost my parents, have been trying to survive. No one else understands you better than I do. Jackson has been working for us and all I can do is watch him kill himself and for what? Look at this room, look how disgusting it is. Nonetheless, we cannot hate everyone. We can blame the rich if it pleases you, but we cannot hate the poor for following them. We are on our own already and I don’t want to end like a recluse.” Jaebeom parts from the wall, his hands now into the pockets of his stained jacket. “Hatred is going to destroy you more than it will build you.”

He pats Jinyoung’s shoulder before leaving.

From his spot on the dirty furniture, he closes his eyes again as he hears his friend utter about the bread being mouldy again.

--

“I will definitely pay you back for your help! Thank you!” Vivienne has other things to do today. She mentioned her aunt being very sick so you decided to stay and finish cleaning in her place. Only a couple of offices are left so it shouldn’t take long. You are thankful for that; your back has been in pain for the past weeks.

It happens a lot when the weather is humid.

Being a charwoman is hard, but it is easier than any other occupation available. It is convenient for you don’t have to meet with anyone but your direct superior and it is quiet. The school is always empty whenever you arrive, making the tasks more peaceful and bearable.

That is, until someone makes a scene for no acceptable reason.

Come to think of it, it is ridiculous for someone to be mad at you for not despising the rich. How did he expect you to react? Doesn’t he know how easy it is to maim one’s life? You brush the thoughts away when you’re finished. It’s a little mistake bound to never happen again. Everyone has their own worries and you have plenty already.

After all, there is so little you can do to change things.

You feel your bones crack when you stretch lazily, your neck now stiff and hands burning from the strong detergent. You are thirty minutes away from bed and board - it sounds less pitiful that way - and you cannot wait.

The evening is moist and warm, adding to your damp skin and tearing shivers down your spine. You grab your holed cardigan, letting it swipe the floor as you pass the big wrought-iron doors and stop when you find him, again.

He wears no sign of resentment for his face is relaxed, lost even. He takes a few steps toward you when he finds you staring.

“Good evening.”

His voice is deeper than you remembered, but you don’t have the time to ponder on his tessitura. Your hand hurriedly goes to your stained dress in order to bow respectfully. You don’t know who he is and you would rather not risk it a second time.

He seems to have quite the bad temper.

“There is no need for such greetings.” He stops you mid-way, a careful hand prompting you to abandon the useless movement. “I am of the same...social standing.”

You blink at him, Vivienne’s words echoing at the back of your head.

“Is there…. anything you need?” You try carefully, your face straight. You cannot let the incident affect you.

Jinyoung looks around the building, expecting to see your friend arrive and silently hoping she would come just a bit later. “I wish to discuss...about our previous encounter. Do you happen to have time to spare?”

He seems too careful to be that gentleman who almost barked at you. Still, you don’t feel like pushing him away. Despite all the commotion, his eyes captivate you whole.

You nod, turning around when these same orbs appear to be restless and looking for something.

“My friend is already gone.” You explain, sensing he might be looking for the person who is too familiar to be a mere workmate.

Jinyoung nods, reacting quickly before someone walks by. “There is a garden, this way.”  He takes a step back and nods toward an empty bench between trees; the one you oftentimes find when your legs hurt too much to walk back home just yet.

He lets you lead the way, his hand into his pockets and looking prudent.

You sit without waiting, the thought of him being of same class enough to erase all plans of acting according proper etiquette. You see he doesn’t mind, or probably doesn’t care for he sits slightly away from you, his legs and arms now crossed. He leans and turns, his face now on full exposure and absorbing all the clouds’ hues.

He is surprisingly gracious, even wrapped into miserable clothing.

“I would like to ask for forgiveness. I didn't mean to be such a brute and speak so harshly. I lost my temper. If anything, I am relieved you are the one I have been corresponding with. Before you ask, I knew it was you as soon as I saw the way you were looking at the notes.” He begins, his tone steady.

“Why do you...speak this way?” You ask. He seems awfully polite for someone of the same background; god knows how uncommon it is for the lower-class to be so conscious of each-other.

Jinyoung doesn’t understand. “How do I speak?”

“Like I am of high upbringing.”

“What is a high upbringing?” Jinyoung cannot help but ask, his face now genuinely confused.

You sigh, not grasping the situation. “I am poor. You can speak comfortably.”

“I am only respecting you. Everyone shall be addressed with respect, regardless of upbringing or whatever you want to call it. Do you not agree?”

It doesn’t surprise you. You’ve heard enough of him to understand his intentions. It matches with his previous words and actions. This gentleman can’t abide this society.

“I do. I do but it doesn’t matter nor changes anything.” You answer, turning around on the bench to face him.

Jinyoung hums, before the hint of a smile blooms on his usually stern features. “It just did. While I am sure no stranger ever treated you with respect, it just happened. How does it feel? Do you not want it to happen every day?”

“It is unusual. I am not sure whether I feel comfortable or not.” You admit, quite amazed by his tricks.

“I wish everyone would. Do not misunderstand; I am no idealist but I wish for things to change.” Jinyoung continues, his arms now relaxed as his hand finds his cheek to let his head rest on it. “It is why I acted the way I did. My passion is bigger than my brain.”

You chuckle at the comparison. Passion is something you’ve lost long ago. “You’re not the regular type of student.”

“When I see my fellow classmates, I can definitely take it as a compliment.” Jinyoung hoped for a serious conversation. He had prepared a ton of sentences, full of apologies. Now everything is gone and he is left with only himself and your rather composed self.

“But, what makes you so different?” You question, eager to know more. Maybe it is because he looks and sounds mysterious.

Jinyoung hesitates and takes a proper position on the bench, before clearing his throat. “Background. It makes a big difference and it is not a story you wish to hear but I am willing to share if you do the same.”

You nod, adopting the same posture on the bench. You have all the time you need.

--

This gentlemen’s name is Park Jinyoung and he is an orphan. It is the first sentence he uttered when he recounted his story. He probably left a lot of gruesome details aside but it looks detailed. From the burning of the building where he lived to how he ended in coal mines like every kid. He mentions a man who paid for a couple of the kids’ education as the reason he ended here, before explaining how he wishes to become a famous writer. He is smart, brilliant even, from the way he speaks to how he expresses his emotions.

He looks nothing like the enraged gentleman in the amphitheatre.

“When I put that first piece of paper under the table, I was convinced I would correspond with another boring and over-mannered student.” Jinyoung finishes, glancing at you.

“I might not be as entertaining.” You admit, eyes glancing back but unable to hold the same intensity.

“What is entertainment anyways…If anything, I am glad it was you.”

You freeze, the mere thought of being sufficient to anyone enough to block your every joint. No answer leaves your mouth, but Jinyoung doesn’t need any.

“How about you share your story now, art student?” He even jokes, his smile building wrinkles around his eyes.

You cough.

Jinyoung listens, looking really absorbed when you explain how your father left your family when you were a kid. You try to say as much as you can think at the moment. It is difficult to gather the information but you succeed, deliberately keeping some things to yourself and mentioning only the bearable details too. This gentleman doesn’t need to know everything right now, he has enough to be able to leave the stranger zone, but too little to be a confidant. You refuse to admit you are actually ashamed of sharing the darkest part of your life.

Jinyoung isn’t surprised. He lets you finish and claps his hands two times, speaking about unlucky people and misery. He insists on walking you home and you agree. He who was so out of reach earlier is now close at hand and relaxed.

And as you expected, you enjoy his company.

Jinyoung does, too. He was supposed to find you and apologize before disappearing but his literary personality brought him beyond borders. He doesn’t try to explain it, not in the mood to resolve the enigma.

Deep inside, he knows.

You are leaving when he stops you, his voice slightly quivering as he asks for another encounter. You tell him that he knows where to find you and he promises to show you something at school the next time he sees you.

When Jinyoung gets back home, he greets Jaebeom with a smile. The latter is surprised but not shocked.

That night, he lets them eat his share of food.

Sleeping is impossible despite your level of exhaustion. The evening repeats, endless and replaying Jinyoung’s careful composure. You let it invade you, captivated and curious to know more about him. You fall asleep to him and his unexpected ideas about a world where no one should suffer.

--

“Vivi, stop saying such nonsense!” You don’t want her to imagine things. Vivienne is into romance and fairy tales so it is normal to see her squeak in delight when you tell her what happened.

“Are you going to see him again? When?” She is ecstatic, her agitated hands doing a poor job covering her high-pitched voice. You shake your head, unable to find the answer to such a simple question.

You don’t know when he will find you again. You know nothing about his whereabouts but he knows your schedule and that makes it all extraordinarily exciting. You are almost eager to head to work in hope he will appear magically, at any corner.

But for a whole week there is no sign of Park Jinyoung. Even though you walk back home with heavier steps, even though you stay longer than usual, he is nowhere to be seen.

Maybe it was just common courtesy. He did act like quite the gentleman so he probably wanted to make it up for that first encounter. That must be it.

“Patience is a virtue.” Vivienne speaks one night upon arriving where you live. “He will show up.” she seems confident with her tiny smile as she leaves you by your door. She has obligations she cannot postpone.

“Y/N?” You hear when you close the door, a heavy smell filling your nose. You rush toward the voice, gasping when the horrifying scene appears before your eyes.

“Mother, what happened?” You almost cry, kneeling in front of a bleeding woman. Her face is soaked with tears and her body is so rigid it is almost impossible to make her move.

“A rough...client.” She speaks through gritted teeth, her split lip painting a red line on her chin.

It happens sometimes. Your mother would come back abused and hurt.

“Why don’t you stop, mother? You don’t have to- You don’t-” your tears are heavy with remorse when you find her, gasping for air that isn’t going to rip her probably broken ribs. “I can do it; I will do it so stop working there.”

She glares at you, looking more pitiful than threatening. “Do not think about setting a foot in that nightmare ever again. I will not let my daughter...sell her body.” She finishes, torn between rage and sorrow. “I am sorry for not being able to give you what you deserve.”

“It’s fine, mother. It’s fine.” You help her lay down properly and sit by her side, not reacting when she mentions she wasn’t able to bring money today.

It is the darkest point in your story. You like to think you can live with the thought of your mother working in a brothel but you don’t. She always does her best to show you a positive side of herself, celebrating when she brings enough money to buy two miserable sausages and silent when younger prostitutes are preferred to her company - leaving her without a single coin. She never talks about her occupation in hope it’ll be forgotten in the middle of hardships but you see it; you see the blood-stained fabrics and hear her cries deep in the night.

It is a common occupation. Prostitution is the easiest way to have sufficient money and a lot of young ladies and women resolve to work into brothels. The ones who wander the streets alone never end well, their encounters ending badly more often than not. Therefore, brothels are so busy; no one wants to sell themselves without any sort of support.

But for what? Brothels do not care about their workers; the women are abandoned when deemed useless and fired without any consideration. You hate that world, you hate how easy it is to lose all humanity for dirty money.

You have to survive although it hurts is what your mother said while taking your place in the brothel. She gave her dignity away upon seeing her daughter deprived of her innocence and ordered you to find a proper occupation.

She must have had enough of you coming back smelling like alcohol and tobacco, limping until your body would crash on the floor, shaking. You were never mad at her, it was your decision, as stupid as it was. You feel guilty now, guilty for letting her take your place and deteriorate her body even more.

“I will bring something to eat tomorrow mother, I will be paid.” Your income is ridiculous but it is better than nothing.

She answers incoherent words, her head lifeless on the dirty bed. You look at the blood stains on her dress and close your eyes.

You hate it here.

--

Jackson is exhausted. He walks with difficulty, his cough getting worse with every night he spends at the mine. He cannot attempt his training sessions anymore but he jokes about it being useless and not worth his time. He also refuses to let Jinyoung or Jaebeom go, pretending he prefers working there anyways.

Both Jinyoung and Jaebeom have to force him to stop.

“You can take care of him better than I will. I’ll take his place tonight.” Jinyoung says, already aiming toward the door when he hears Jaebeom begging him to be careful.

“I will try.” he answers, before leaving.

“You two shouldn’t go there…” Jackson speaks, his voice even raspier than usual. “You two have the potential to make it out of here. I have nothing but thick skin. I can do this.”

“You have to stop saying this.” Jaebeom looks mad but he is merely trying to hide his fear. “We can’t make it out of here and even if we do, we won’t sacrifice you. Stop being so stubborn and let us work, too. We won’t break.” He finishes, ignoring the flashing memories.

Jackson brings him back into reality. “Don’t be dumb. I haven’t been sacrificing myself all these years for you to fail now.  We all know I am lucky to be breathing. You two better become famous or I will haunt you in the afterlife.”

“I promise I will kill you myself if you ever joke like this again, Jackson. Just sleep, I’ll wake you up when I’m done with the potatoes.” Jaebeom orders, walking away before he starts sobbing.

Life is too messed up.

He knows he has always been the weakest one. Jackson has a strong body; he endures everything and never gives up. Jinyoung has immense willpower; his determination makes him the toughest. Unlike Jackson, he doesn’t cry.  

But what about him? He was the quietest as a kid; the one who would follow without questioning. He had the weakest body because of an accident where he fell right on his head and hurt his back in the process. He is the oldest but can barely support his own brothers. His eyes find his notebook, filled with poems he wishes to show the world. One day, maybe, he will consider himself as a man.

As Jaebeom pokes a potato he hears Jackson, way too loud to be considered in bad shape.

“You better not be thinking about negative things, I’m warning you!”

He chuckles, the tears stopping from falling into the boiling water.

“I’m not!”

--

“Hello.”

You jump, the broom falling from your hands and hitting the floor. Jinyoung is standing against the opened door, his arms crossed and a tiny wound visible on his eyebrow arch.

“Hello…” You trail of, bending to pick the fallen object.

“May I wait for you to be done with work?”

You blink, observing Jinyoung’s face which looks puzzled when confronted to your silence. He balances himself from one foot to the other.

“Are you okay?” Jinyoung insists, tearing you from your trans. You nod clumsily, barely able to answer before Jinyoung turns around to greet someone.

Vivienne appears from nowhere, sweaty and looking like she has been running around the building

“Oh- Oh! You are the gentleman from the other night!” She stops next to Jinyoung, her eyes communicative in a not so subtle way. “We are almost finished but,” she walks toward you and grabs the broom, wrapping her arm lazily around your shoulders. “I can do it by myself!”

You look at her, then at Jinyoung who snorts, looking slightly surprised to see such an upbeat person standing next to you.

“If you are free, I would like to show you something.”

“This young lady is totally free to go.” Vivienne bows, her arm now pushing you violently to make you react. “I will see you later!” She then turns around, signalling there is no way to escape your fate.

You look at Jinyoung with a timid smile which he answers quickly before taking a few steps back. “After you.” he almost chants. You thank him, still at a loss of words. You have to wake up at some point and try to hold a conversation but it is as if your brain stopped functioning.

You hear Jinyoung’s steps next to you, echoing in the halls as he proceeds to tell you where to go. The walk is silent but none of you mind; you both have issues you need to ponder over.

The school is filled with marvellous places and gardens. You never dared wandering at its heart but you couldn’t help but notice the few rooms and plants, full of flowers blooming in the thick nature. It’s an old but elegant building.

Jinyoung makes you turn a couple of times but it’s enough to take you to a new aisle, one you never set a foot in. It looks like it isn’t used because it is empty.  He takes the lead and stops in front of a door before opening it.

“It is my favourite room. I don’t come as often as I used to.” Jinyoung lets you enter, his hand revealing a big and illuminated room. “It’s the perfect time to come here.”

it is indeed. The room is filled with paintings, from the walls to the floor. Some of them are dusty, others look new. The colours are melting together perfectly and are drinking the last traces of the sun which invites itself behind the windows.

“This is where they store the paintings from the classes.” Jinyoung arrives behind you but doesn’t stop and aims for the windows. he opens the thick glass and takes a deep breath. “It is so quiet around here.”

There are only trees on that side of the school so no one walks by and Jinyoung is thankful for that. You watch him lean against the window frame, the wind sweeping his hair and for a second he looks like that gentleman in romantic books.

You join him quickly, his aura attracting you unconsciously. “Why did you want me to see this room?” you try, both glad and hesitant.

“You seem to be in need of peacefulness, just like me.” The gentleman explains, finally turning his head to find your distraught orbs. “Today more than anything, I want to pretend only I exist. Or maybe I want to disappear.” he chuckles.

“I feel the same, without the room to hide myself into.” You joke, raising a hand to hide yourself behind the last sunbeams.

“Feel free to use this room when needed. Once the school is closed you are free to wander these walls.” Jinyoung offers, his eyes not leaving your face as you start playing with the lights and their warmth.

How much of waste is it to look this stunning but to be considered like dirt.

He finds a tear falling down your cheek and it makes him speak faster than intended. “What is the matter?” he presses, leaning to arrive at your level and inspect your face.

You shake your head, observing his features and noticing a couple of tiny cuts signalling he must be shaving regularly.

“If someone were to be hurt while trying to make your life better, would you feel guilty or enjoy what you have as a token of gratitude?”

The question takes Jinyoung off-guard. It hits so close to home that it hurts for a second, the images of a Jackson wheezing and coughing already haunting. He opens his mouth, not noticing the proximity as he picks the words carefully before he ends in the same state as you.

“I would want to enjoy, but guilt would take over. Knowing me, I would be blaming the whole universe instead of doing something useful. there is so much I worry about, so much I can’t find the force to face.” He speaks words which are true. Jinyoung doesn’t know how to deal with the guilt so he fights. He haunts, in search of a new element to hate so he doesn’t end up despising himself for being so useless.

“What is worrying you? I personally don’t do any of these. I do not enjoy nor do I fight. I live through the days, ignoring the pain of my own blood which is too often spilled.”

“Is it about your mother?” Jinyoung knows this much. You mentioned living with her and your eyes are too bloodshot for it not to be about someone as dear as a parent.

He understands he got it right when you start crying. You cry so loud it almost scares him but he quickly recovers, his face turning toward the nature outside.

Unfortunately, he knows too much about the sacrifice of a parent not to understand your sorrow. “There is nothing a parent isn’t willing to do for their infant. I discovered this at a young age.”

It makes you stop crying instantly, remorse taking over once again. “I’m so sorry- I didn’t mean to-” you sigh, muffling more pitiful noises because you are being completely insensitive and complaining about your mother while he is an orphan. “I shouldn’t be so childish when there are people who couldn’t-”

Jinyoung’s head appears, almost like a whip. “Don’t. Don’t speak like you are pitying me. If you want to cry go ahead, I promise it will not make much difference. You have the right to worry about your mother and feel like you are useless. You are no dead weight though; you are alive and breathing and it is the most important thing for her. Parents want their kids breathing, let it be air or dust.”

You feel even more sorry when you hear his resilience. You nod furiously, melting in numerous tears as Jinyoung grabs his sleeve to wipe your messy face. He cleans it as thoroughly as he can, from the salty drops on your eyelash to your runny nose. He brushes your sticky locks away from your face before patting your head softly.

“Let’s leave my worries for another encounter, young lady.”

[comparatist]

Sabitribai Phule: The First Dalit Woman To Be A Teacher

Savitribai Phule, was the first Dalit woman to be the pioneer of spreading education among the impoverished section of the society by working day and night, firmly sticking to resolution of making academia inclusive. She always raised her voice against unfair segregational terms of the society. During her time, education was reserved for the dominant caste, class and gender but then, she was brave enough to breakthrough the notions of dominant hegemony and was hell bent to provide for the oppressed communities.

• Personal Life:

Born in 3rd January, 1831, in Naigaon, 50 KM from Pune, Savitribai was the eldest daughter of Lakshmi and Khandoji Neveshe Patil. She got married to Jyotirao Phule at the age of 10 in 1840. The couple started living in a Dalit working locality. Jyotirao took interest in educating his wife and trained her to become a teacher. Shakharam Yashwant Paranjpe and Keshav Shivam Bhavalkar (Joshi), his two associates took the further responsibility of helping in the progress of Savitribai's education. She went through the formal teacher’s training at Ms. Farar's Institute in Ahmadnagar and Normal School of Ms Mitchell in Pune.

A Voice Of Dissent Ensuring Social Justice:

Savitribai was the first person in the country to become a teacher and headmistress as a woman. The couple started their first female school and set up a Native Library in 1863. They also built a ‘home' in their own house, which was a safe haven for tortured widows and pregnant women, meant for the prevention of infanticide. Together they established the Satyashodhak Samaj which preached of marriage devoid of dowry and extravaganza, supporting widow remarriage and protesting against child marriage alongside. Savitribai and Jyotirao had no child of their own, so they adopted the child of a brahmin widow, educated him, and arranged an inter-caste marriage for him.

Their constant resistance against the brahminical hegemony was a ray of hope for the Shudra and Atishudra women. She started a school for Mangs and Mahads but then a lightening struck their fortune when Jyotirao's father threw them out while the training was going on. Govande immediately arrived Pune and took the responsibility of Savitribai. When she returned, Bhavalkar looked after her education requirements. Throughout the training process, the couple encouraged vocational and the practical form of learning for both sexes, so that the students can flourish their own independent thought process. The believed in the attachment of an industrial educational sector along with the school so the children can learn useful trades and acquire craftsmanship to lead a comfortable life. Education should provide the agency of free choice, they preached. The school they created had special zones for children’s creative freedom. The planning and their dedication sprouted shoots of success when the parents of girls studying there, complained about the ‘overindulgence' of their daughters in studies.

• A Staunch Personality Overthrowing Obstacles : She was one of the flagbearers of gender justice during that time. Women weren’t allowed to access education then. She went forth against the normalised patriarchal set up enough, to make men wait for her in street, passing lewd comments, pelting stones or cow dung at her. She always kept 2 saris with her and change into the cleaned one after reaching the school, which would again get soiled on her way back. This happened everyday but she refused to back down. The guard who was appointed for a safety had in his memoirs written about what she would say to those men who teased her for making education available for women, “As I do the sacred task of teaching my fellow sisters, the stones or cow dung that he threw seemed like flowers to me. May God bless you!”

In July 1887, when Jyotirao suffered from massive heart attack and got paralysed from his right side, she nursed him from dawn to dusk and was always by his side. Her intense support made him recover quickly. However the financial system of the family was in tatters by that time. Mama Paramanand, a well known political sage and a well wisher tried to help them the most. In the letter to the King of Baroda, Sayajirao Gaekwad, Paramanand mentioned the historical ground breaking work the couple was doing and said the following about Savitribai, “More than Jyotirao, his wife deserves praise. No matter how much we praise her, it would not be enough. How can one describe her stature? She cooperated with her husband completely and along with him, faced all the trials and tribulations that came their way. It is difficult to find such a sacrificing woman even among the highly educated woman from the upper castes.” The couple had literally spent their whole time working for the marginalised sections.

Students living in their hostel had praises for the couple for their contributions. Laxman Karadi Jaaya from Mumbai said, “I have not seen another woman as kind and loving as Savitribai. She gave us more love than a mother could.” Another student named Mahadu Sahadu Waghole wrote, “Savitribai was very generous and her heart was full of kindness. She would be very compassionate to the poor and needy. She would constantly give the gift of food, she would offer everyone meals. If she saw torn clothes on the body of poor women, she would give them saris from her own house. Tatya(Jyotirao) would sometimes say to her, “One should not spend so much.” To this she would smile and ask, “What do we have to take with us when we die?” Tatya would sit quietly for some time after this as he had no response to the question. They loved each other immensely.”

When Jyotirao passed away, she was present there. As municipality had refused the burial of his body with salt as he wished, the last rites were performed in the pyre. Savitribai had courageously approached for the earthen pot to be held, then, and consigned his body to the flames. It was the first time in the Indian history, that a woman performed the funeral rites. Savitribai later erected ‘Tulsi Vrindavan' with his ashes on the spot where he wanted to be buried. After his demise, she took the reins of Satyashodhak movement in her own hands and was the chairperson of the Satyashodhak Conference in 1893 at Saswad, Pune.

• Her writings:

Poems that she had pinned down, along with other forms of creative outlets, are full of anti caste hegemony sentiments and provide boost towards harbouring a thought of attaining a gender equal society. Her works continued to be an inspiration to many, not only in the present time, bearing the reflection of struggles of past, but in the near future too.

The list of her writings is presented here:-

1. Kavyaphule- Collection of Poems, 1854

2. Jyotirao’s speeches, Edited by Savitribai Phule, 25th December 1856

3. Savitribai's letters to Jyotirao

4. Speeches of Matoshree Savitribai, 1892

5. Bavankashi Subodh Ratnakar, 1892

• Death: The year was 1897. The plague had overtaken the city of Pune. People were dying in clouts. The Government assisted by the officer Rand went out for helping the needy. Savitribai with the help of Yashwant set up a hospital and would herself go to pick up people, hospitalise them and ensure treatment. She continued to serve selflessly in spite of being fully aware of the contagious nature of the disease. The son of Pandurang Babaji Gaekwad from the Mahad community was affected by the plague. As soon as the news reached her ears, she wasted no time, to rush him to the hospital, carrying the sick child on her back. This way the disease reached her too. On 10th March, 1897 she passed away at 9 PM.

• Teacher's Day:

Go, get education

Be self-reliant, be industrious

Work-gather wisdom and riches,

All gets lost without knowledge

We become animal without wisdom,

Sit idle no more, go, get education

End misery of the oppressed and forsaken

You've got a golden chance to learn

So learn and break the chains of caste

Throw away Brahman's scriptures fast.

Since 1962, 5th September is regarded to be the Teacher's Day and calls for apparently an unanimous celebration on the birth anniversary of independent India’s 1st Vice President and 2nd President, Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan. The popular understanding of teachers, educators and gurus has been moulded by upper caste brains and has been always represented through the upper class and patriarchal lenses in the form of Dronacharya, Manu etc. The ‘meritorious' men shaping the history with their social-political and economical dominance over the forsaked is just a version of excluding the contribution of the marginalised and emphasising on the insurance of the right to education for the privileged only.

For a counter, a section of people are already speaking up against such dire injustice and celebrating Teacher’s Day on January 3rd as Education day or National Teacher’s Day, on the birth anniversary of Savitribai Phule.

Our academia, nation has disregarded her works in the context of societal upliftment, to a great extent, by erasing her contributions from history books, nationalistic discourses and our memory. Her resistive stamina against brutalities performed upon the non-dominant sections is a stain in the brahmin dominated and appropriated knowledge system in India.

[beneaththetangles]

Welcome to the Gift of Condescension

We’re proud to present a guest post today by blogger and Yale Divinity School student James, who has written series of articles for us in past about Planetarian and Steins;gate. Note: this essay is based solely on the anime adaptation of Welcome to the N.H.K. rather than the light novel or manga, whose stories differ in some respects. All quoted dialogue is from ADV’s English dub.

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Humans bristle when they suspect someone is being condescending toward them. Either pride impels them to reject a condescending person’s claim to superiority, or their own sense of inferiority drives them to isolate themselves, anything to escape the critical gaze of others.

Sato, the protagonist of Welcome to the N.H.K., falls into the second category. Whenever he goes out in public he is convinced everyone is looking down on him. As a result, at the start of the series he is a hikikomori, a college drop-out with no job who lives on his parents’ money and has barely left his apartment over the past four years.

However, he meets a girl named Misaki who is going door-to-door with her aunt passing out religious tracts on the growing social epidemic of hikikomori. She later summons him to a local park and announces her intention to “rescue” him. Her motivation? “I’m just a sweet little girl who wants to help you out.”

Coming from a perfect stranger, this would be odd even if Sato’s only flaws were his social ineptitude and crippling paranoia. But given that after only a few episodes the audience—and, to some extent, Misaki—can see he’s a porn-addled pervert, her persistence becomes downright uncanny: “It’s all right. I still just want to help you get better, you know?” Sato is understandably dumbfounded: “What’s up with that girl?! What the hell’s going on?!” On further reflection he wonders, “What if she’s like some guardian angel sent here to rescue me or something?”

Sato’s turn to a divine explanation for Misaki’s inexplicable behavior might seem fantastical to some, but it is actually quite natural. While the condescension humans have for one another is contemptuous, there is also such a thing as divine condescension, an attitude of mercy and grace that is devoid of cruelty or self-interest. The Bible teaches that God shows humanity such divine condescension, for example in Psalm 113:6–7, “He stoops to look down on heaven and on earth. He lifts the poor from the dust and the needy from the garbage dump.” Small wonder, then, that Sato begins to see Misaki as an angelic figure and accepts her help.

But this image of Misaki soon begins to crack when she suggests he deal with the insecurity born of his own personal failings by looking down on others—i.e., by practicing the human condescension Sato suspects everyone of showing toward him: “If you find it too difficult to elevate yourself, you just have to put everyone else below you. Just look down on them. That way, even if they do think you’re stupid, at least you’re even.” Misaki then blithely admits she does this herself when dealing with Sato, which naturally angers him. She tries to placate him, but her facade has already fractured.

Eventually Sato begins to question Misaki’s motives: “I don’t know who she is! I don’t know why she’s helping me or if she’s helping me! I’m completely in the dark.” He even wonders if she intends to keep him a hikikomori forever.

Sato’s suspicions are later shown to be justified when he is on the verge of committing suicide and she attempts to talk him down:

Sato, you’re not a rock on the side of the road! You’re a human being! That’s right! You’re a flesh-and-blood failure of a human being! You’re special! You’re the only one! More useless and an even bigger waste of flesh than I am! A hikikomori like you is even lower than a stray dog! I need you, Sato! I can’t live without you! So please…Sato…you just can’t die now, you can’t!

In short, Misaki’s apparent display of divine condescension toward Sato is really a display of human, all too human condescension. Far from rescuing him, her purpose is to enable his hikikomori lifestyle so she can continue to feel better by comparison. All human relationships are defined by this sort of callous self-justification, or so an old classmate of Sato’s named Megumi subsequently tells him:

I know you’re not stupid, Sato. By now I’m sure you’ve realized that this world is looking down on you. That they think you’re scum. Don’t you understand, Sato? They’re using you for their own selfish needs. Society wants hikikomori like you to exist. It makes them secure. It gives them someone to look down on. Even if their lives are falling apart they can always say, “At least I’m better off than that guy.” Don’t you see? This world’s dog-eat-dog! It’s a zero-sum game! If you don’t look down on others then they’re going to look down on you!

As to how Sato and Misaki’s relationship ends up, that is not our concern here. Rather let us ask, what are we to make of Sato’s search for grace? I would say his instinct in associating disinterested mercy with the divine is sound. Still, he was mistaken in trying to find such mercy in a mere human, for as Megumi rightly observes, people always seek to justify themselves. So too in Luke 18:11 the Pharisee prays, “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”

The question thus becomes, is there any divinity in which we can find merciful condescension? Misaki, for her part, is convinced that “if there’s a God, then he’s evil for sure” because so much of life is spent in suffering: “Logically there’s no way a God who created such a horrible, unfair world can be a good person. So God is evil without any doubt. It’s the obvious truth.”

This objection to God is prevalent in anime (and, of course, among religious skeptics in general). I will not address the charge here, as others wiser than I have already responded. Nevertheless, I will say this: humans desire above all else to be known and loved despite their repulsiveness, and more than that, to become truly better people, to overcome their sins and failings. In these respects Sato is representative and gives us an opportunity to look hard at ourselves, if we can stand it. Welcome to the N.H.K. illustrates that we cannot hope to find such mercy and aid in mere humans, whether friends or lovers, but it stumbles in suggesting that God is, if anything, the problem rather than the solution.

Misaki insists that God made the world full of suffering as a divine conspiracy of sorts, but it is the first humans, Adam and Eve, who chose to sin and thereby brought suffering upon themselves and all who came after. Similarly, Sato’s old senpai Hitomi claims “there’s no such thing as a bad person,” but in reality the world is full of nothing but bad people. In our sorry state we grasp hungrily for understanding and absolution, but the only one who says to us, “I know you completely, yet I love you” is none other than Jesus the Christ, God in the flesh. He does not simply love us as we are and leave it at that, though – he cancels all our sins, past and future, and changes who we are, if we will trust, believe in, and follow him.

Thus, Christians believe divine condescension is real, that such condescension can be found in the person of Christ, and that in following him we are not only forgiven but also perfected. As it is written in Philippians 2:6–8, Christ,

Being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

Even after confessing faith in Christ our lives will be riddled with regressions, just as Sato resolves to leave behind his hikikomori ways multiple times and just as many times falls back into them. But God, despite our many failures, will grant us forgiveness if we turn again toward him and seek it, as it is written in 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” In this truly divine condescension toward our persistent weakness lies the perfect sweetness, rest, and comfort we are all too liable to look for in fallen humans.

O God, no man or creature can help or comfort me, so great is my misery; for my ailment is not physical or temporal. Therefore You, being God, and the One always able to help me, have mercy on me. For without Your mercy all things are terrifying and averse to me.

But I beseech You of Your kindness to have mercy on me—not the lesser mercy which you show temporarily for physical distress, but Your greater mercy which You show for the distress of the soul. Have mercy on me, and forgive me my sin. Amen. –Martin Luther

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James is student at Yale Divinity School who loves thinking about theology and how it factors into his favorite stories. His writings on theology, philosophy, and other topics can be found on Wordpress, and you can also find him on Twitter.

[dancemovers]

The Detroit race riot of 1943

Check this out on https://endsmedia.stream/detroit-race-riot-1943/

The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source

[potuzzz]

Reddit Comment 1

https://www.reddit.com/r/AntifascistsofReddit/comments/avgf4v/another_question_from_a_conservative/

{{Bold = Link}}

Hello! I made a Reddit account just to answer the 1st part of #2!

Woohoo! Long-ass answer!

Okay, so, one of the really difficult things about the alt-right/modern fascist movements, is that they're really sneaky about their iconography.

Obviously, most sensible Americans know that the Nazi swastika is a horrible symbol, and those who brandish it have a tendency for hatefulness, racism/sexism/homophobia/etc., violent tendencies, etc.

One of the primary goals of the alt-right/modern fascism, is they have to sell their ideology to the general public. It's a slow process. Obviously, you can't jump out the gate, screaming "LYNCH THE BLACKS! GAS THE JEWS!" or everyone will be disgusted with you/not take you seriously/act against you.

Fascist iconography goes a LOT deeper than overt symbols, because they have to keep it covert, both to appear normal to the general public, and to be able to identify each other--a secret handshake, if you will.

Other flags that are essentially synonymous with the Nazi swastika, or worthy of suspicion, include:

- Iron Cross

- Black Sun

- Identity Evropa

- Conderate Flag

- Kekistan

- Flash and Circle

- South Africa's Apartheid Flag

- Flag of Rhodesia (1968–1979)

- AWB Flag

- Celtic Cross

- Wolfsangel

- National Socialist Movement

This is just a few off the top of my head.

Some of these aren't ALWAYS used by fascists/the alt-right/Nazis. The Confederate flag could plausibly be in the ownership of someone who isn't a fascist--or at the very least, subconsciously racist. The Celtic cross has plenty non-fascist history, as does the wolfsangel. The Kekistan flag could also be used by somebody just "trolling" or who is ignorant of what it actually stands for. They also steal a lot of Nordic imagery that I, an ex-pagan, have even used.

You have to kind of play it by ear. Obviously, if I saw some young kid with a Kekistan flag, I would just assume he was ignorant. I tend to also be suspicious of people with a lot of Harley-Davidson iconography, the "biker" look, or even just the "pure southerner" look, but I'm sure there's plenty of bikers and proud southerners who don't subscribe to the ideals of the alt-right.

That being said, if I was in a public place and there were a mob of bikers with Confederate flags, wolfsangels, and Kekistan flags, I would have no doubt in my mind that they'd all be crypto-fascist/fascist sympathizing garbage.

Some other common indicators (especially when combined with racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, xenophobia, general hatefulness, etc.) of a member of the alt-right include:

- Pepe the Frog / frog-related memes, emojis, etc.

- The "ok" hand emoji

- "NPC" meme

-Non-ironically using words or phrases such as: cuck, libtard, soyboy, white-guilt, virtue-signaling, race-traitor, cultural-Marxism, White Genocide, red-pilled, based, SJW, beta, 1488 or just 88, JQ, HH, six million/six trillion/six gorillian, goy/goyim, oy vey, ((( ))) (known as "echoes," there's usually someone's name inside the parentheses), anti-white, kek, rapefugees, "We Wuz Kangz" or "dindu nuffin," (correctly) asserting that the world is run by a tiny minority of corporate elites but wrongly assuming they're all Jews (it's some sort of "Zionist plot"), Soros, the liberal elite, the Deep State Dems, talking of white oppression or the disappearance of the white race or Western culture, "Jews/Blacks/etc. will not replace us," "blood and soil," talking of an "ethnostate," saying shit like "America for Americans," etc.

-Calling yourself euphemisms such as "identitarian," "race realist," "nationalist" or "white nationalist," "ethno-nationalist," "racialist," "white nativist," or the like.

Now, it would be ridiculous if I screamed "NAZI" everytime somebody used the "ok" hand emoji, a frog emoji, posted a meme with Pepe or NPC, or said cuck or beta. Part of the gaslighting tactics used by the alt-right/fascists is to make you seem like you're on a witch-hunt, being overly analytical or intolerant.

Example:

Say I had a Twitter profile. I say lots of crypto-fascist things.

Maybe I tweet "I want jobs to be protected from immigrants" (which might secretly mean: I hate Mexicans and Muslims) Maybe I tweet, "I think Western culture should be protected" (which might secretly mean: I hate non-white foreigners, I don't want them dirtying American culture with their inferior cultures) Maybe I tweet "I hate stupid cucks always virtue-signalling on Twitter" (which might secretly meas: people defending minorities from attacks are spineless queers who do it because it's a fad)

Nobody can call me out on any of this, or risk looking like an overly-sensitive witch-hunter. If you accuse me of racism, I'll say, "What the fuck are you talking about? It's not like I said the n-word. It's not like I said "gas the Jews." You libtards call anyone to the right of Karl Marx a Nazi these days, huh?"

The idea is to erode confidence in the anti-fascist and social justice movements. Make them all look like paranoid, violent, intolerant loonies.

And maybe, just maybe, I have an "ok" hand emoji in my Twitter username--and so do a lot of guys saying similar stuff as me. But if I'm called out on it? "Pfft. Seriously? You SJWs are going after emojis now? When will the witch-hunt end?"

To cover your questions #1, part two of #2, and #3:

#1. Fascists and the alt-right have an ongoing campaign to make it look like the Christian, straight white male is under attack to lure members. This is mostly untrue.

I have absolutely nothing against Christians, but I will criticize,denounce, and resist a Christian if they're being a bigot. I myself am a straight white male, and have nothing against other straight white males, and my best friend is a straight white male. However, I will criticize, denounce, and resist a straight person, white person, or a man if they're being a bigot. Plain and simple. You'll notice that the alt-right movement is largely straight, white, and male. This is because it is a white supremacy movement, not because straight white men are oppressed, disappearing, or under systemic attack. Social justice activists who say things like "fuck all men" or "all white people are garbage" or the like, in my opinion, are just hateful individuals, not indicative of the social justice / anti-fascist movement as a whole. That being said, if a criticism is fair, it's fair.

Part two of #2: Antifa is not a centralized group, so there's technically no "rules." If a person wants to punch someone they're certain is a Nazi, that's their own decision. I personally believe that it can harm the movement, and I'm naturally a pacifist. However, if somebody is trying to spread an ideology that calls for division, racial hierarchy, hatred, anti-intellectualism, genocide, and just straight up not having human empathy, then maybe they deserved to be punched. Violent antifascist individuals are simply willing to stop the most toxic movement on the planet, by any means necessary, even force.

#3. The end goal of fascism is violence and oppression, on a massive scale, against those not on the "in-group." The in-group currently is typically seen today as any white people. How long until it's only heterosexuals? How long until women aren't equal anymore, either? How long until the Irish, the Italians, and the Slavs aren't "white enough?" The in-group in the fascism hierarchy naturally grows more and more exclusive.

When someone is pushing an ideology that has this sort of end goal, it's not a matter of whether I disagree with them or not. It's whether I want this world to be dominated by what is a force of death, hatred, and destruction.

I'm pro-choice, strongly, but I wouldn't hinder a pro-lifer in a way that I would hinder a Nazi. I wouldn't hinder someone who has a bad taste in music, or who voted Republican, or who says the Earth is flat, or who's libertarian, or conservative, or who has fundamentally different religious/spiritual beliefs than me. The alt-right / fascist movement, in my opinion, is the most dangerous thing, and cannot be handled with kid gloves. Their ideology encourages violence and oppression, so their words must be treated like violence and oppression. It sounds a little pre-emptive, but I promise, fascism is a one-way trip to hellish scenarios for 99.9% of humanity.

The alt-right / neo-fascist movements are the BIGGEST obstacles that defend the ultra-rich, the corporate hegemony, and the military-industrial-intelligence complex that sows death, destruction, and misery worldwide. They're the unwitting little brother that defends an older brother, something far more dangerous and sinister. Without these sort of movements, the peoples of the world--of ALL races, sexes, sexualities, non-destructive ideologies and creed, walks-of-life and backgrounds, nationalities, and religious beliefs--ALL would be able to band together and change the universally oppressive, unjust, unfair system that we all live under.

In summary, when asking whether someone's a Nazi or not, there's plenty of small, easy-to-miss indicators that make up a bigger picture. You have to make a judgement call. If the person seems carefully bigoted, uses a lot of the language, or uses a lot of the crpto-fascist imagery, they're probably fascist. You have to know when you're dealing with an unwitting neutral person, but you can't be afraid to call a Nazi a Nazi, even if they've never thrown a Nazi salute, flown a swastika, or yelled "HEIL HITLER!"

Not everybody who voted for Donald Trump was a fascist--Hillary Clinton is a piece of garbage, too--but a MAGA hat, or otherwise being a BIG fan of Trump, is an indicator to me as well.

I hope this has helped, any and all questions are welcome. I see you said you're not from the U.S. so I apologize for jargon, idioms, etc. Also for getting lazy with the links after a bit lol.

Compassion and reason!

[balioc]

New everything-looks-like-a-nail theory:

Scrupulosity is a form of narcissistic injury.  It is the tearing-at-the-seams damage that results from an attempt to stretch your personal identity over a consequentialist or deontic moral framework that is not shaped to support human narratives. 

*****

The true perfect effective altruist does not fret about his failure to give more or to do more.  Why would he?  Fretting achieves nothing.  It will not add one QALY to anyone’s existence; it will not cloak one bed in a malaria net, or deworm one child, or put one dollar in the hands of the wretched.  And of course it actively adds a small dose of misery to the world, in a small-but-direct way, because fretting sucks.  No EA theorist recommends it.  The true perfect effective altruist gives everything he possibly can, and when that’s been exhausted, he stops giving and returns to himself with a smile on his face.  Needless to say, even if you are a flawed mortal effective altruist who gives only a little of what you can, your hypothetical true-and perfect counterpart would urge you to adopt his sanguine attitude.  (He would also urge you to give more, but the one thing is independent of the other.)  Beating yourself up doesn’t help! 

Yes, yes, this is all very obvious and well-established.  But it turns out that we’re not perfect utilitarian calculating machines with perfect control over our emotions.  Sometimes our brains make us feel the wrong things. 

Indeed.  So why is your brain making you feel this particular thing?  What is causing you to sink into needless unjustifiable misery over a failure that doesn’t actually affect you, or anyone you love, or anyone you even know? 

Some EA-type scrupulosity-sufferers talk about their elaborate, soul-shredding visions of all the suffering in the world.  I’m sure that they represent their experiences honestly, but I respectfully submit -- if The Suffering Out There were truly at the heart of the matter, the pain would manifest as great grief, but not as guilt.  Guilt is a feeling that focuses entirely on the self.  The guilty individual believes (or, rather, feels) that he has the power to tip the scales between goodness and badness, that it is worthwhile to focus on his own private sins.  The world contains great masses of suffering, no one person’s altruism is going to come anywhere close to changing that, and everyone knows this very well.  If your imagination can whip up a vision of the child who starves because of your failure to give a little more, then it can also whip up a vision of all the equally-real children who will starve regardless of what you do.  And, indeed, that too is a thing that happens to people, a different kind of depression induced by an overactive empathetic faculty. 

But your scrupulosity wants to make it all about you, right?  You didn’t skip enough meals to buy malaria nets, so you caused some poor African to die horribly, so you should lie in bed feeling like a worthless piece of shit. 

When some part of your mind goes into self-obsessive overdrive, and the topic under consideration doesn’t actually have anything to do with the practical details of your life or relationships, this is at least a strong piece of evidence that something narcissistic is going on.  

And consequentialist practices like EA can be built into the inherently-non-consequentialist makeup of a narcissistic identity, just like anything else. 

You stare into the mirror, and like all the rest of us, you cannot help asking: who am I?  And, because you have constructed one particular kind of story, you answer (in part): I am an effective altruist.  I do real good in the world.  I weigh the consequences of my actions, and give where giving will help, and save lives.  Which is, in theory, a fine and noble thing to tell yourself, at least if it has any truth to it.  But it means that, when you feel like your self-conception is under assault from the world, when you’re lost or lonely or scared, and you gaze inwards for confirmation of your ego -- am I really the effective altruist that I believe myself to be? -- you must proceed to apply the standards of judgment that come packaged with the EA identity.  Being an EA means precisely that you evaluate altruism-related claims with consequentialist standards.   

Those standards are not meant to hold up anyone’s identity.  They are, in human psychological terms, impossibly brutal and impossibly unfair.  They do not recognize a concept of “satisfactory” -- they do not even recognize a concept of “excellent” -- they recognize only more good and less good, and the domain space of more good is infinite.  There is no vision of the Worthy EA to which you can compare yourself, there is only the math, and the math will invariably tell you that you could have done a lot more. 

(The Giving What We Can pledge represents an attempt to combat this problem directly, by creating a vision of the Worthy EA and saying “a 10% income donation means that you can successfully identify with this vision.”  It’s noble, but I believe that it’s basically doomed to failure on a broader scale.  As a story,a cultural artifact, it can’t compete with competing virtuous-person models that have a lot more resonance and narrative talent behind them; its only real selling point is the quality of the philosophy that underlies it.  But anyone willing to care about to the philosophy will also insist on caring about the fact that 10% is an arbitrary number, and that the math stubbornly insists that you could buy yet more malaria nets with 11% of your income...)

*****

With religion, the problem is often much worse, because religious communities understand this phenomenon and actively try to exacerbate it.  

Some very high-minded and rarefied forms of religious practice -- various mysticisms, mostly, and the purest strains of mitnagdic Judaism -- use something akin to the fundamental logic of the EA theorists, except that they replace “QALYs” with “inherently divine action.”  This isn’t about you.  This is about God, and praise, and holiness [ / adherence to the Law].  Do what is right to do.  Focus on the glory of heaven [ / the fact that you are doing what is commanded].  Stop thinking so much about yourself.  It’s totally beside the point. 

That’s rare, though, and really super rare outside dedicated clerical communities.  What you usually get, instead, is a very cruel promise:

If you follow the rules well enough, if you are sufficiently holy in thought and word and deed, then you will get to incorporate it into your identity.  You will be a Holy Person.  You will be happy.  You will be fulfilled.  You will be saved.  You will be welcomed into the Kingdom of God.

Which is monstrous.  Because you can’t even theoretically follow the rules “well enough,” any more than you can “give enough” to charity.  Holiness isn’t virtue-ethical, it doesn’t actually provide you with a human model of success that you can live up to -- it just evaluates every single moment of your existence according to a strict code, and in any moment when you’re being less than entirely holy, it sends back “FAIL.” 

This is super terrible, if you want people to build secure foundational identities from which they can grow.  But it’s really great if you want people to be perpetually guilt-ridden and anxious, which is a useful state of mind to cultivate in certain kinds of low-ranking community members who are mostly supposed to be obedient.

*****

Much the same, I’m sure, can be said of social justice. 

[thescem0em0-blog]

Aware of The Power of Words

If paper became aware, how many violent wars would leap out of the pages of textbooks, dash out of the schools and into the streets, to reignite the flames of hate? Again, if paper became aware, how many sobbing broken hearts in this merciless world unfair, would soak the pages and cause floods that carve new rivers in the cracks of love? And even still, if the papers written, about all the misery, hate, pain, evil, lust, gluttony, and savagery on our blue speck in space, became aware...just how much worse would the world become? Why don't we just think before we pick up the pen, stop and actually think,”Hey, maybe we should try to focus on the positives instead of blowing up the negatives?!” If every person took the time to ponder before plundering away at the keys of a keyboard on a blog or social media..would there be the blindly-raging monster we know as a hate post?..The answer is simple, and also it is NO. If humanity wrote about the better things in life, our outlook would change. Anyone could wake up happier, feel more relaxed, if they woke up to simple,”Good morning everyone!”’s around the world. Cut the crap and save us all, don’t get angry for fun, no drama and no more negative newspaper runs. If paper became aware, in a world aware of uplifting words, how many gentle moleskins, would flutter softly like butterflies against your skin. Again if paper became aware, in a world who treated everyone with respect and communicated on an equal level, how many kind sheets, would come out of newspapers and give handshakes in the streets? And even still, if the papers written about all the good deeds, the life savers, the invention makers, kindhearted children and neighbors on home planet in this big universe, became aware...just how much better would the world become? Let us be better, change hate to love, let us not be divided but birds of unique feathers, and you will see warheads dissipate into a flock of doves.

[revjasielhern-blog]

“Is there a Prophet in the Land?”

Scripture Text: 2 Kings 5

We all have something to say. We want to speak our truths and bear witness to who we are. Everyone can say something about almost anything. For instance, we all know that one person who always has an opinion or something to say about every single little thing - the news, the latest TV show, the economy, public education, etc…  And the most annoying part about this is how they love to let you know at every chance they get. Every single time. But whether their words have some value or not, well, that’s part of our discernment. 

We all have something to say. But it is in the way we say it - that includes the words we choose, the kind of message we give and credentials, and the truthfulness of our statements - that people listen to what we have to say. If there is a big tree in the forest and falls down, but there is no one to witness it - no one heard it, no one saw it - did the tree really fall? This question also applies to the words we say. If we say something but no one is there to listen - to witness it - did we really say something? 

As we examine our current situation in the country, we might realize that there is a tremendous increase in people saying things about everything. With social media and the now various forms of communication, there is always someone saying something, giving an opinion, casting judgement, and creating information about pretty much everything. Therefore, it has become incredibly difficult to listen. Words have lost their value. Even if a person has something worth sharing, those words might get lost within the chaos of all the noises that surround us. Especially because some noises are louder than others - some people have the means and power to be louder. 

So, how can our voices be heard? If we have something to say that is worth sharing, how can we find a way to say it so that other people will listen to it? 

Well, if you happen to be a politician, that’s not hard at all. Last week we were given the opportunity to hear what the democratic candidates for the presidency had to say about their political platforms. During this debate, these candidates said so many things, some of those things were interesting and productive, but other things were shameful and absurd. Nevertheless, many people across the country listened to what they had to say because they are in that position of power. If you happen to be a top executive in a big corporation like Facebook or Google, chances are, whatever you have to say will indeed be listened to by others. But if you happen to be a teacher, a regular worker within a business, a farmer, a mother or father, chances are that what you have to say will not be really listened to… 

And if you happen to be unemployed, a person with special needs, a veteran, a person of color, a person from another country, or someone living in a detained facility on the Texas border, it is very likely that whatever you have to say will be completely ignored. Words have lost their value because we value people differently. 

That is the situation in which we live. We all have something to say. But not all of us have the same opportunity to have our voices be heard. We all have the talent to say something, but many of the words we say are simply ignored. 

The Old Testament reading for this morning gives us a powerful story about people and their struggle to have their voices be heard. 

The first main character introduced in the story is the commander of Aram’s Army, Naaman. Aram was located in the part that is now Syria east of the sea of Galilee. Based on the story, we know that Israel and Aram had conflicts in which Aram prevailed under the leadership of commander Naaman. He is the loudest voice in this story given his socioeconomic position. He has power and richness in the land; he has authority over the Aramean armies; he has dominance over the other kingdoms of the area - including Israel. Most likely, he was the second most powerful man in the land. But despite this power and authority, Naaman finds himself ill from one of the most awful conditions during that time - leprosy. Therefore, he needed to find a cure for this suffering, and it may seem that what he was looking for he couldn’t find in his homeland. His power, richness, and authority could not heal him. 

And this is the point when we encounter, in my opinion, the most important character - the servant girl from Israel. She had been captured by the Arameans during one of the raids. She had been separated from her family and culture. She had been given an unfair and miserable reality. She was a servant in the house of Naaman, her voice didn’t matter. She had come from the enemy country across the river. She looked different; she worshipped a different god; she celebrated different holidays and festivals. Of course her voice didn't have any value. And most importantly, she didn’t have to do anything for the one who had captured her and made her life miserable. Yet, she chose kindness over hate - she offered a word worth sharing, a message of healing and forgiveness, a hint of hope. 

It is only because of the words she spoke that this story came into existence. The most insignificant voice became the most important one - the one worth sharing. She told Naaman’s wife to go see the prophet in Samaria so that Naaman could be finally healed. 

And so he went. Naaman, surprisingly actually, listened to what the girl had to say and proceeded into his quest for healing. After a not so great encounter with the King of Israel, Naaman gets a word about where to find the “prophet of the land.” This is when the prophet Elisha gets introduced into the story. Naaman is told to go wash seven times in the waters of the Jordan River. But he doesn’t like that idea, and he doesn’t like the fact that Elisha couldn’t even tell him that in person. Naama questions the credentials and the authority of the words of Elisha. Who is this person to tell what to do? Why should I listen to an ordinary person from another land to go do something that seems useless and foolish?

 Of course, this commander, a figure of power, demanded attention and answers right away. He wasn’t playing around.  Of course, it was hard for Naaman to swallow his pride and privilege and hear the words of this prophet from another land who worshipped another god who lived in the margins of society. 

But in order to find healing, Naaman needed to strip away from all these superficial things and selfish assumptions. He needed to hear the extraordinary God of Israel working through ordinary people. 

So, He finally listened, he went and did as he was told. 

And this is the turn around of the story. 

Naaman is healed and realizes that there is only one God in the land - that is the God of Israel. He now wants to worship God and offer the very best of what he has and who he is. He even takes some soil from Israel to place it in Aram as a shrine for worship. This is a powerful transformation - a radical change. And it was only possible by listening to the voices of ordinary people - the people living in the margins of his society. 

But now we encounter Gehazi, a man of God who served with Elisha. I think this is the saddest part of this story. Or at least the most disappointing. The person who is supposed to be close to God, the one is serving alongside Elisha, this person is the one who has the wicked thought; the one who falls from grace. Gehazi thought that Naaman got away with too much compassion, so he decides to trick him into at least getting some fortunes from him. His words are the most hurtful because they speak lies. His words now become the loudest because he thinks he is too smart - he can deceive Elisha, Naaman, and even God. This man of God speaks lies and they are listened to. And this situation reminds me of the quote: “every lie we tell incurs a debt with the truth, sooner than later that debt is paid.” And that is exactly what happens. Gehazi’s words had a tremendous cost and such cost was paid by becoming ill himself. He becomes the man with leprosy as the story comes to an end. 

We all have something to say, but not everyone is listened to. We all have the talent to say words, but every word we say has a cost. Everyone has a voice, but some voices are louder than others. So, how can our voices be heard? 

There are plenty of Naaman’s in this land. People with power and authority that are ultimately broken and therefore seeking healing and restoration. People who choose to act with selfishness and hatred. People whose voices are so loud that silence the voice of others.

There are many people facing the situation of the servant girl. People from other cultures and backgrounds, separated from their families and friends, who are enduring very harsh conditions. People whose voices have been ignored for a long time. People who remain in the margins not being paid attention to. People who despite their misery continue to act with kindness and without hatred. 

There are many fellow Christians like Gehazi. People who say they worship God, but rather give into wicked thoughts. People who say one thing and act the opposite way. People who think that offering healing and forgiveness to others different from us should not be a thing. 

But what about people like Elisha? Are there people in this land who are willing to offer a prophetic word? Is there anyone in our midst who can offer a word of healing or restoration? Is there a prophet in this land? 

I truly hope so. I hope there is someone willing to say something that is worth sharing. I hope there is someone who is not afraid to speak up and question the wrongs that we see in this land. I hope there is someone whose voice offers freedom and equality for all. Our voices will be heard no matter what when we offer a prophetic word; when we speak the truth; when we faithfully proclaim the good news of the gospel in every time and place. 

 Friends, there's one reason we're supposed to be here and that is to say something so people want to hear.

So, is there a prophet in this land? I hope we all can say AMEN.  

[iamonein4]

New Post has been published on https://iam1in4.com/2017/08/relapsed/

Relapsed

By StayingAlive123

I relapsed this week and it has been hell.  A combination of different things triggered it for me.  There has been a lot going on that has been out of my control.  Instead of working on the things I can control, I have been allowing this out of control feeling to wreak havoc with me and my emotions.

When there is a lot going on that I feel negative about in my life, I tend to distract myself with food or Netflix or something, instead of just taking responsibility of my feelings and dealing with them.  Sometimes it is so difficult to recognise these feelings before they begin to spiral though, and that is what I am trying to work on every day.

Relapsed – I don’t want to die

At the start of this week, suicidal thoughts were starting to creep in.  This is when I know I need to get help and support ASAP.  I don’t want to die, I just don’t want to feel the intense emotional pain anymore.  And the depression convinces me that the only way the emotional pain will end would be if I wasn’t here anymore.  It convinces me that I am a burden to all my friends and family because I am depressed.  It convinces me that this is how I will feel for the rest of my life – and who would want to love me if this is the way I am?  How will I be able to bring my own children into the world when I can’t cope with life?

The anxiety will start to kick in and tell me that this mental illness is going to ruin my life, that I am probably going to lose my job over it and then get in a mountain of debt.  Then I’ll become homeless and live alone then eventually die alone, so what is the point, end it all now.  Stop the misery in its tracks and just end it.  Writing these thoughts down exactly how they come into my head makes me realise just how ridiculous and irrational they are, but in the moment, they are so real and I 100% believe all of it.  So it gets extremely difficult to calm down, and to realise that it is all irrational thought, when the depression convinces you that it is as real and as rational as breathing.

I lean on my boyfriend

I also tend to lean on my boyfriend way too much.  Or project my feelings on to him, and that way I can be angry with one thing/person.  I realise this is totally unfair and not reasonable behaviour.  I convince myself during the bad times that he can fix my problems by just taking care of me and being there.  If he isn’t there when I think I “need” him, I get so angry and furious with him and believe that he is the problem, that he should understand exactly the way I feel, and that he doesn’t love me.  Because in the moment, I believe he is the only thing that is going to make me feel OK.

I also convince myself that he knows all of this and is deliberately telling me he is busy or has other things to do, so I then believe he is deliberately trying to hurt me.  Which is totally irrational.  But when I am at my lowest, the negative thoughts spiral out of control and I don’t understand which parts are rational and irrational.

I am the only person who is in control of what I think, feel and do, nobody else.  So I need to work hard on recognising when things are getting tough and finding ways to deal and cope with my emotions and feelings.

Millions of people feel depressed

This is a problem I think a lot of people have when they are depressed.  The depression tends to make you believe that the world is against you.  Nothing you do in this world will ever amount to anything.  You are worthless and your life is pointless.  I get this feeling sometimes even driving to the shops, or if I get stuck in traffic on the way to the beach or somewhere for a nice day out, particularly when I am really low.  I will start to believe that the traffic is the world’s way of telling me that anything I try to do to make me feel happy, isn’t going to work.  I’ll start to think that the world is telling me to give up.  As if the whole universe is conspiring against me.  I mean, who the fuck do I think I am!?

But the truth is, there are so many distractions in everyday life with social media, work, the news, advertising etc.  It is so difficult when things aren’t going great to be able to focus on the good.  I know the good stuff is there, I just need to focus on that instead of all the negativity.  But it is force fed to us, from the moment we wake up till the moment we go to sleep.

I know that millions of people feel depressed at this moment.  There is clearly a problem with society for there to be such a huge epidemic of anxiety and depression.

I am sick of all the doom and gloom in the world

I wish that social media hadn’t taken a hold of peoples lives.  That people didn’t care so much about material things.  That people cared about one another more.  I wish people viewed every other person on the planet as equal.  That we all treated one another with the same respect as we believe we deserve.  I wish people loved themselves as much as they want someone else to love them.  I wish people didn’t settle for what they think they deserve in life.  That everyone knew they were capable of things that are beyond their wildest dreams, and that people didn’t care so much about what everyone else thinks of them.  That everyone in the world was born with the same opportunities.

I wish the media didn’t focus on all the terror and fear in the world.  I wish they would show us 5 minutes of all the great things that had happened in the world at the end of the news each day.

Never give up

I am starting to drag myself back out of this deep depression now.  I am still in two minds as to whether I believe I will feel like this forever.  So I know the cloud is still hanging over my head, lingering, trying to beat me to my knees and convince me to give up.  I hope I never give up trying to win this battle with my mental illness.

I just need to find what works for me.  To cope when the dark cloud comes looming over, sucking up all the light and happiness with it.  Right now the depression feels like a stampede of gigantic buffalo, stomping on any positive thoughts that I have.  I am trying to beat them away with a stick.  Hopefully a tornado of light and positivity is going to come bashing its way through all this pain and misery and take the stampeding buffalo with it.

Life is tough, but so am I.

I hope.

Reproduced with permission, originally posted here

[dancemovers]

The Detroit race riot of 1943

Check this out on https://endsmedia.stream/detroit-race-riot-1943/

The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

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The Detroit race riot of 1943

1943 - A race riot there will be

The summer of 1943 found the United States embroiled in the worst war in world history and the industrial might of Detroit was playing an integral part in winning it. Common during times of war, domestic hatreds and tensions grip entire communities, bringing out the best and worst even among allies. At a time when Americans were pulling together to defeat its enemies, societal problems of long standing chose a bad time to rear its ugly head in Detroit. In June of 1943 Detroit suffered one of the worst race riots in the country’s history, forcing America to take a long, hard introspective look at itself. Analysts concluded there was no one specific cause to the disorder but rather a multitude of causes that had been a long time in the making. It was, if viewed on the whole, just pieces of a puzzle.

"Because we got Henry!" In the early 1900s, Detroit civic leader Homer Warren, who was renowned for his silk tongued sales pitches that he often lobbed at prospective out of town investors, routinely centered his arguments on Detroit’s most famous face. “Detroit is going to grow and grow. We’re going to have a million people within a few years. And do you know why? Because we got Henry Ford. He’s figured out a new manufacturing method – the assembly line. He’s gonna standardize and mass produce his car faster and cheaper than any of his competitors. There’s going to be the biggest damn explosion of heavy manufacturing this country has ever known and Detroit’s going to be right in the middle of it. And do you know why? Because we got Henry!” Henry was the first to employ thousands of blacks when everyone else was reluctant to hire even one. His $5 day would also be the catalyst for the largest demographic change in American history. Ford taught successive generations the time-honored American principles of perseverance and sacrifice. The road to success meant outworking the other fellow and paying your dues. Henry reveled in sending shock waves through the corporate world. Endowed with only a fourth grade education, Henry felt ill at ease around the Ivy League blue bloods of industry and no doubt took great satisfaction in showing them up, a feat which he accomplished with regularity. As an innovator Henry stood alone amidst the world’s best. Ford’s perfection of the assembly line would revolutionize the industry. His five dollar day, double the industry rate, was scoffed at by the titans of industry who viewed him as unwittingly reckless. On the contrary, Henry Ford knew people. Unlike the entrenched aristocracy whose riches blinded them to the true pulse of America, Ford came up from the bottom and thus was afforded the unique opportunity of witnessing all the layers of society along the way. By 1915 Henry was the most famous man in the world. Henry Ford, more than any other man, shaped the face of Detroit for generations to come. The Great Black Migration    1910 - 1930 With the final withdrawal of Union troops in 1877, Reconstruction had come to an abrupt end, as did the hopes and aspirations of free Southern blacks. The Democratic Party, in those days referred to as the party of white supremacy, slowly returned to power throughout the South. The ghostly apparition of the Old Confederacy had re-appeared and with it the continuation of the black agony. The term Jim Crow originally referred to a character from an old minstrel show dating back to pre Civil War days. It was a white man dressed in blackface performing a mocking rendition about black life. It proved immensely popular with whites. In post Civil War days Jim Crow came to refer to local laws and customs designed to enforce segregation and prevent blacks from gaining any political, social or economic power. While the North made some inroads towards desegregation, the Jim Crow mentality persevered throughout the country. Its hotbed of course, was the South. This concept was further buttressed by the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v Ferguson which declared that separate but equal facilities were constitutional. Referred to as Jim Crow laws, they were enforced until President Lyndon Johnson ended the indignity by signing the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.                            Jumpin Jim Crow lyrics Come listen all you galls and boys I's jist from Tuckyhoe, I'm going to sing a little song, my name's Jim Crow, Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow. Oh I'm a roarer on de fiddle, and down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific like Massa Pagannini. Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.

The Old South had changed little since the Civil War. Reconstruction, despite some noble efforts by the Radical Republicans to rectify inequities, proved to be a myth. While the legal act of slavery could be eliminated, the mentality could not, especially when civic leaders chose not to enforce the law. Even well into the 1960s blacks were terrified of white reprisal if they tried to register to vote.  But it was more the everyday affronts of being treated like a second class citizen that inflicted the most egregious of injuries.  By the early 1900s, Jim Crow had grown to monstrous proportions. The dehumanizing “Colored Only” and “Whites Only” signs began to appear on the scene. With each passing generation the indignities built up until a cement-like hatred permeated society.  Because Reconstruction was such an abysmal failure, we would have to do it all over again in the 1950s and ‘60s. As the post Civil War dreams of prosperity withered away for Southern blacks, one former slave lamented, “We have very dark days here. The rebels boast that the Negroes shall not have as much liberty now as  After General Sherman’s March to the Sea was concluded, he solicited the advice of former slaves on how best to facilitate them in the postwar South. A black preacher advised him to give each free slave “40 acres and a mule.” Acting upon this,  Sherman began granting ex-slaves abandoned plantation lands. President Andrew Johnson later nullified this and ordered the lands returned to their former owners. Johnson’s version of                     Reconstruction was much different than Lincoln’s. Johnson saw it strictly as a reunification of North and South, not helping ex-slaves get started on a new life. As time went on it became more and more apparent that there was little opportunity to be found in the South for blacks and that their newfound freedom was mostly illusionary. Since blacks owned no land, did not control government or provide jobs, they wound up working for the very people who once owned them. As sharecroppers, they earned a mere pittance and were essentially nothing more than freed slaves. Older blacks tended to take it in stride; the agricultural life was all they knew. Young blacks, however, yearned for something better and believed the seeds of opportunity would germinate for them in the North. Reasons for migrating North Southern blacks who eventually migrated north during the 1900s wished to leave the misery they experienced in the South behind for good. It was this same misery that brought about the formation of the blues which became the subject of many of their songs. The blues were a combination of dreams unfulfilled, biblical belief, spiritual ebullition and present/past agonies and aspirations. Whether it be prisoners on the chain gang or prisoners to the cotton field, the blues helped express pent-up feelings and vent a multitude of hostile frustrations to help discouraged blacks make it through yet another day. Blues legend John Lee Hooker originally hailed from the cotton fields of Mississippi. Like many southern blacks, he made his way to Detroit during WWII. Hooker had joined the army during the war but was let go when it was discovered he was underage. Adrift in Detroit, the veteran bluesmen found a new home in the Hastings Street clubs where his southern blues music struck a cord. His eerie Mississippi moans and throaty wails simply couldn’t be duplicated. Hooker would call Detroit his home for the next 27 years, witnessing dramatic social changes first hand.                    "I was happy in Detroit because I loved the music.  John Lee Hooker

1917 - 2001 Southern blacks entering Detroit found a city totally unprepared to accommodate them. The most immediate problem, one that would haunt the city indefinitely, was housing. The housing shortage was acute before the Great Migration and would get worse for decades thereafter. Blacks were caught in the cross-hairs of redlining, a practice of bankers and real estate agencies who would draw a red line around areas on the local map where they refused to allow blacks in. This left Black Bottom, an enclave of dilapidated wooden houses that should have been torn down before they fell down. Unable to buy, blacks were forced to rent from slum lords. Because the rent was two or three times higher than normal they were forced to take on boarders to make ends meet, creating terrible overcrowding. There were some niceties associated with working in the auto factories. There was little wage discrimination between blacks and whites. The difference came in job stature and promotion. Blacks were given the most dangerous and health hazardous jobs such as iron pouring, furnace tending or spraying paint. While it is true whites often did the same work, they were frequently promoted despite having considerably less time in. This mentality was confirmed by a plant manager, “Negroes can’t work on the presses. We brought the Negro to this plant to do the dirty, hard unskilled work. If we let him rise, all of them will want better jobs.” To his credit the manager admitted this was unfair, “But we can’t try any experiments here.  We are competing with other automobile firms and we’ve got to keep our men satisfied to keep up the competitive pace. Personally I’d like to help them, but what can I do?” “When I die, bury me in Detroit” Southern blacks had long considered Detroit the Promised Land and Henry Ford a Moses type character who led them out of bondage. As far back as the Civil War, Detroit was a major terminal of the fabled Underground Railroad. In the 1910s, Ford’s $5 day and the U.S. entry into WWI proved to be the parting of the Red Sea and at the end of it was the salvation of Detroit. Southern blacks held an indelible scorn for the Deep South and the Jim Crow mentality that prevailed and humiliated. Detroit represented a cultural rebirth. No longer would they have to remove their cap when talking to a white person. No longer would they have to step off the sidewalk to allow a white to pass by unimpeded. The euphoric liberation that the North provided invoked a common request, “When I die, bury me in Detroit.” ​                        “I’m goin to get me a job, up there in Mr. Ford’s place, Blacks earned more money than they had ever dreamed of in Detroit’s auto industry, but was it worth the price? Young men grew old long before their time because of the physical toll and hazards they encountered at work. Southern blacks were not the only entity envious of a high paying blue-collar job. A veritable tidal wave of white Southerners also flooded into Detroit. Over 500,000 migrants arrived between June of 1940 and June of 1943 alone. Approximately 50,000 were black. The rest were a hodgepodge of poor white Appalachians, unsuccessful farmers, Baptists, Methodists and others. It was Detroit’s version of The Grapes of Wrath. Detroit had run the economic gamut over the decades. From a buzzing metropolis of the WWI era flaunting its automotive prominence, to an anemic invalid of the Great Depression in the 1930s, and then back again to a bee hive of activity which WWII dictated. With well-paying jobs in excess, the Motor City offered unheard of opportunities. This point resonated throughout the South where poor sharecropping blacks were becoming expendable due to modern advances in farm machinery and the ravages of the boll weevil. Northern whites also grew indignant about their new neighbors. They did not want to live near blacks nor did they want the labor competition which would certainly appear after WWII ended and the multitude of military production jobs began to dry up. Even before the arrival of the southern migrants, Detroit was a checkerboard of ethnicities which included Germans, Irish, Italians, Maltese and various Slavs (a very large Polish contingent), all of whom gravitated toward their own sections of the city. Few people really considered themselves Detroiters; ethnicity dictated who you were and where you lived. Detroit had not yet learned how to be a city. Add to the influx of Southerners a few demagogic and communist agitators and you have the most heterogeneous cast of characters in the country.  Even as Detroit basked in the light of prosperity and national adulation for leading the way in beating fascism, sinister forces were at work which would bring the city down. Detroit was saturated with characters that had an axe to grind. This volatile mix would put Detroit on a war footing of its own. Wartime Detroit was awash with good paying jobs, as this puzzled shop keeper on the left attests to. It was also saturated with a host of dysfunctional groups, many far from home, all antagonistic towards each other. Detroit was bearing the brunt of the war production for the country, cranking out a staggering 1/3 of the military equipment being used to fight the fight. But it came at a price. Detroiters, worn and frazzled from endless production work, were at the breaking point.      Detroit’s racial situation had become so precarious and so pronounced that in August of 1942, ten months before the notorious riot, LIFE magazine wrote a caustic article entitled “Detroit is Dynamite” admonishing the city at length for its poisonous racial atmosphere and predicting the city would riot: Few people doubt Detroit can do this colossal job.  It has the machines, the factories, the know-how as no other city in the world has them. If machines could win the war, Detroit would have nothing to worry about. But it takes people to run machines and too many of the people of Detroit are confused, embittered and distracted by factional groups that are fighting each other harder that they are willing to fight Hitler. Detroit can either blow up Hitler or it can blow up the U.S. From the ashes of the Confederate army came this social club that began terrorizing blacks to keep them from exercising their new constitutional rights. Their overwhelming success caught the eye of the federal government which repeatedly attempted to squash them, thus causing a cyclical existence. By the turn of the century the KKK virtually ceased to exist, only to rekindle in the 1920s to the tune of four million members. It was at this time that they added to their list of adversaries Jews, Catholics, foreigners and organized labor. By the time of the Great Depression they faded away again, only to reemerge one last time during the civil rights heyday of the 1960s. The magazine New Republic estimated that Michigan held as many as 875,000 Klan members, more than any other state. Black Legion - Born out of the decomposition of the KKK, Detroit had become the stronghold for a shadowy fascist group of night riders known as the Black Legion. Originally formed to procure jobs for southern whites during the chaotic years of the Depression, their hit list included but was not limited to Blacks, Jews, Catholics and unions. Although somewhat comical in appearance, the Black Legion was every bit as vicious as the KKK and even more feared. It was publicly known they had penetrated the ranks of big business and government. As a result few people dared testify against the Legion for fear of their transparent agents. Their secretive nature was reinforced by a code, “to be torn limb from limb and scattered to the carrion” if they betrayed any secrets. This is the group that allegedly murdered Baptist minister Earl Little, the father of Malcolm X, in East Lansing in 1931.

The Fifth Column, a name given to enemy agents or disloyal persons working within their own country to undermine its will to resist an outside enemy. The United States, 25 percent of whose population traced ancestry back to Germany, was a tempting target for Nazi recruiters. Racist literature flooded Detroit, concentrating on the tender subjects of housing and employment. The National Workers League, a Nazi front group with large presence in Detroit, was heavily involved in agitating the Sojourner Truth riot in 1942. The Germans reasoned that they may not be able to defeat the U.S. militarily but if they could exploit what was obviously a volatile situation they could create internal havoc. Detroit was the greatest industrial city in the world and was producing the bulk of the U.S. military equipment. For the Axis powers to induce rioting in Detroit and thus disrupt production would be a victory. April 1941 - (Above, left) Thousands of southern blacks were employed at Ford’s River Rouge Complex. In 1941 the UAW waged a strike at the Rouge. Whites walked off the job but blacks stayed behind. Many blacks felt a loyalty to  “Uncle Henry.” The two groups clashed on numerous occasions in barbaric fashion.(Above, right) Yet another subtle but telling reason leading to the riot was Detroit’s antiquated transportation system, once quantitatively compared to the caliber of a small New England town. Due to severe gas rationing during WWII, many depended on the trolleys to get them to work or recreation. With the arrival of several hundred thousand Southerners into the city in the space of a few years, the trolley system became terribly overburdened. Whites who had stood in shock and revulsion at the mere thought of blacks living near them now found themselves literally elbow to elbow with them on the cramped trolleys. Many fisticuffs resulted.  Sojourner Truth - A Portent of things to come Round One The second “Great Migration” of Southern blacks which occurred during WWII caught Detroit badly off guard. Suddenly the city that could bury Hitler found it couldn’t adequately house its own people. The federal government, determined to keep Detroit’s indispensable industrial juggernaut rolling, came to the realization that additional black housing was badly needed. But where would the new black housing be accepted? The sight eventually chosen was located at Nevada & Fenelon, right next to a white neighborhood. There was only one black housing project in the city, the Brewster housing project and it was full. Southern whites were also vying for living space. Locals were under the impression the new housing project was intended for whites until it was given the name Sojourner Truth (after a Civil War slave and poet). Their protestations came swiftly. Strategies were initiated and congressmen were incited, successfully reversing Washington’s decision. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries was fully aware of not only the acute housing problem in his city but of the highly combustible atmosphere between the races. Siding with the blacks, Jeffries reeled off a scathing series of telegrams to Washington demanding they rescind their decision. Much to the vexation of the white community, Washington flip-flopped again and the housing project again was set for black occupancy. The move in date was to be February 27th, 1942. Round one went to the whites as over 1,200 well motivated protestors showed up on moving day, too much for the Detroit Police Department to control. The first black families who showed up at 9 a.m. thought the crowd too volatile and turned back. Later that day two black tenants ran their car through the picket line, starting off a melee. Detroit police used tear gas and shotguns to disperse the crowd but moving day had to be postponed indefinitely. (Above, left) Locals made their intentions eminently clear. (Above, right) Protestors pose with their “trophy.” April 28, 1942 – White protesters line up at the entrance to Sojourner Truth as round two prepares to get under way.Note the protester with the over sized chunk of wood in his hand and his completely unabashed demeanor as he stands in front of the police car.  You could smell it in the air For the generations that grew up in the era of air conditioning, relief from the ravages of the sun is only a push button away. Such extravagances were not available during WWII. The most immediate respite in those days was the public beach. If you lived in Black Bottom, this meant Belle Isle. Sunday June 20, 1943 was a typical day downtown. The sun’s lustrous heat felt quite pleasant early in the morning but quickly spiraled to a challenging ninety-one degrees by the afternoon. Some 100,000 Detroiters decided to patronize Belle Isle that day; 75 percent were black. Belle Isle, the largest city-owned island park in the country, encompasses a spacious 985 acres, but it wasn’t big enough to prevent two volatile groups from avenging past grievances on this fateful day.  The fury of the war had changed Detroit drastically.  Because of the dense, interracial crowds that frequented Belle Isle, Detroit police came to believe that if trouble started, it would likely start here.    Ku Klux Klan - The Invisable Empire The Black Legion fighting for ourselves."Despite the massive show of force by authorities, the white protesters showed an iron resolve. Again the two sides went at it and had to be forcefully broken up, but the black tenants were finally moved in. With forty people injured and over one hundred arrested, sentiments still ran high. One black tenant exclaimed, “The Army is going to take me to ‘fight for democracy,’ but I would just as soon fight for democracy right here. Here we are  The inconclusive showdown that was Sojourner Truth simply escalated raw feelings between the races to a near riot status. Everyone seemed to know that somewhere in the future there would be a rematch to settle old scores once and for all. Sojourner Truth was a portent of things to come.        This time Mayor Jeffries was better prepared. In tandem with 1,100 Detroit police officers, Jeffries requested and was granted 1,600 National Guardsmen to secure the route and site. Round two went to the black tenants. One step closer to judgment day - Thousands of white employees at Packard walk off the job to protest having to work with blacks.      After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats. While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn’t mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, “I’d rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a Nigger.” Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries’ wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster. Life magazine had based its article on the numerous major racial incidents in the months preceding the riot. Hot points included the Sojourner Truth housing project, Packard Motor Car Co & Eastwood Amusement Park. The Broadhead Naval Armory sat on the mainland next to the Belle Isle bridge. Fisticuffs between white sailors and black civilians had been occurring all summer long with increasing intensity. Black youths, seeking revenge for previous incidents, had been mugging whites on the island all day. About 10:00 that night, with a traffic jam the length of the bridge, hundreds of Detroiters were walking to the mainland. White sailors and the black youths finally caught up to each other and soon there was a racial donnybrook the length of the bridge. Detroit police came out in force, arresting dozens. Detroit police believed they had stopped the incident in its tracks but unbeknown to them, other parts of the city, feeding on false rumors and past hatreds, began to erupt. White rioters watch with delight as a car belonging to a black was rolled over and set ablaze.    White rioters took their volcanic anger out on the first blacks they encountered. In the early hours of the riot many unsuspecting blacks found themselves on Woodward Ave.     If you were black you did not want to be west of Woodward Ave. This was deep in 'enemy territory.' Black Bottom was east of Woodward and thus the only real safe confines.  The Detroit riot of 1943, along with numerous other riots that occurred that same year, was known world wide. Nazi propaganda radio was having a field day explaining how the freedom loving Americans, who espoused that democracy was the answer, were now beating each other to death on the streets of Detroit. An embarrassed President Roosevelt had to divert U.S. Army troops that were on their way to fight Nazis in North Africa and instead send them to Detroit to keep Americans from killing Americans.  Roosevelt found a legal loophole to keep from declaring martial law (a prerequisite for sending in federal troops) while giving the army carte blanche to apply as much force as necessary to quickly and quietly put down the riot.  (Above & Below) Detroit police officers defend blacks from the white mob. Although the DPD was criticized for being indifferent to many of the brawls, surely these victims would have entered the long list of fatalities without them.  (Above) Rioters began stopping trolley cars and abducting black patrons who were given a swift, unconditional beating.   (Below) In every disaster there seems to emerge some sort of hero. Someone who takes great risk, not for the sake of their own personal aggrandizement but simply to quench a thirst for justice. As is often the case they remain forever anonymous. A white passenger attempts to sway a blood-thirsty mob that was determined to assault black passengers. Note how a number of rioters closest to the car ignore his plea and continue to search the car for potential victims.  Army Colonel August Krech, the garrison commander at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, was the senior army officer in the area. He suspected there would be trouble in Detroit and if martial law were declared it would be his responsibility to quell the disturbance.Detroit police use Tommy guns and tear gas to halt a white mob trying to enter Black Bottom in search of potential victims.  As such, Krech conducted two mock drills earlier in the summer to see how long it would take to get troops to Detroit and he assured Mayor Jeffries he could go from the staging area at Rouge Park to the streets of Detroit in 49 minutes. Krech was good to his word but the bureaucratic bungling of his superiors who misunderstood the prerequisites of declaring martial law would prevent him from stopping the disturbance in its tracks, allowing the riot to escalate.  Edward Jeffries, mayor of Detroit from 1940 - 1948, was forced to deal with a explosive situation from the onset of his administration. Hundreds of thousands of migrants entering his city with no other purpose than to make money and thus had nothing to lose by venting their frustrations. Jeffries was livid about the Life Magazine article predicting Detroit would riot. Life is a "yellow magazine with just enough half truths to impress anyone who doesn't know the facts." Yet inwardly Jeffries knew the city was a powder keg. Police Commissioner Witherspoon was informing Jeffries daily of the growing number of incidents between blacks and whites, any one of which could erupt into a full scale riot. Many of the conditions, such as deplorable housing, could not be rectified in any reasonable time frame.  Jeffries made a desperate plea on the radio during the riot "Our enemies could not have accomplished as much by a full-scale bombing raid. I appeal to the good citizens of Detroit to keep off the streets, keep in their homes or at their jobs." Harry Kelly was Republican governor of Michigan from 1943 - 1947. Kelly was no stranger to chaotic situations. In 1917, with the U.S. entry into WWI, Kelly quite law school to join the army. Severely injured at Chateau-Thierry where he lost his right leg and was awarded the Croix de guerre. After completing law school, he began a rise through the Michigan political arena, going on to become governor and Michigan Supreme Court judge. Kelly, like Jeffries, was fully aware of the turbulence in Detroit. The Detroit Police Department had only 3,400 men to deal with a hostile population of nearly 2 million. Kelly and Jeffries had met with local army commanders months before the riot to discuss possible army assistance and both were led to believe that only a phone call would be needed for the army to be dispatched to Detroit. This plan was to be known as "Emergency Plan White." Colonel August Krech General William Guthner Army General William Guthner was Colonel Krech's immediate superior. Guthner's superior was General Aurand. Both Guthner and Aurand were stationed at Camp McCoy in Wisconsin. When Governor Kelly's call for assistance came into Aurand's office at 11:00 a.m. Monday, his chief of staff Colonel Davis interpreted Kelly's desperate plea as a "possible" request for assistance. Thus began a number of gaffs by the army. As Aurand pondered prepatory ideas, he dispatched Guthner to Detroit to take charge. On the flight over, Guthner, like Aurand, began thumbing through the army manual pertaining to such situations. Guthner concluded he had no authority to send in troops, only the President himself could issue such a directive. As the hours ticked by, the riot grew in intensity. Army officials in Washington, apprised of the situation, drew up a presidential proclamation allowing the army to enter Detroit without declaring martial law. At 9:25 p.m. Monday, Guthner gave Krech the green light to clear the streets.  "he went about doing good"                                                        - Acts 10:38 Dr. Joseph De Horatiis came to America with the fervent belief that all men are created equal and even the meekest of immigrants could excel. Amidst the chaos and tumult of the riot, Dr. De Horatiis received an emergency call which would take him through Paradise Valley, an all black section of Detroit. Stopped at a roadblock by a Detroit police officer, he was sternly warned about the potential ramifications. The doctor waved him off; he had a duty to perform. By the time he got to the intersection of Warren and Beaubien he was stopped by black rioters who beat him to death. Detroit police pull the battered and lifeless body of Dr. De Horatiis from his car which was found in Paradise Valley. Dr. De Horatiis' stubborn but professional insistence on carrying out his Hippocratic oath would ultimately cost him his life.  At the funeral, Dr. De Horatiis’ lifelong friend, Father Hector Saulino, brought home the gravity of the riot. His emotion-choked eulogy ran on, reminding us that “Many times the good doctor refused to take money and often paid the bills of specialists he called into cases. Many times he loaned great sums of money without taking notes. After thirty-seven years of service he died poor, owed much of that money still. In his death Dr. De Horatiis offers a solution to all wars – Christian charity. When will the world learn that as long as men beat one another and strive greedily and selfishly against each other, peace cannot return to stay?” Dr. De Horatiis' bier            Blessed Sacrament Cathedral                                 Detroit A monument for Dr. De Horatiis off Gratiot serves as a poignant reminder of that shameful day long ago. The Final Agony With the riot now almost 24 hours old, white mobs attempted a final charge into the ghetto of Black Bottom. Beleaguered Detroit police, having anticipated as much, had erected barricades to prevent a certain slaughter. When shots rang out from the black occupied Frazer Hotel, the police found themselves in No-Mans land. Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams, having just answered the distress call over the radio, emerged from his police cruiser and was shot. Detroit police then unleashed a withering fire of over 1,000 rounds upon the rickety hotel, pock marking the entire face with rifle and even shot gun fire.  Adams would later die of his wound, according to the Reverend Brestidge, "He was the victim of the hate of man, which has replaced the love of God in the hearts of too many of us." Detroit police officer Lawrence Adams.               Wound proves fatal. The black occupied Frazer Hotel would host the finale of the riot. Detroit police would storm the bastion after receiving gun fire. Miraculously, after pumping over a thousand rounds into the structure, only one occupant was seriously hurt. The military police then marched down Vernor Highway and into the rebellious ghetto of Paradise Valley. This proved more challenging. It was here they found the feistiest part of the white mob trying to enter the ghetto and to rumble and burn their houses down. The DPD managed to keep them at bay temporarily but were badly in need of reinforcements. The army was greeted with curses, stones and an occasional gunshot to which they answered with bayonets and tear gas.  By 11:00 p.m. Bloody Monday had drawn to a deadly close. The authorities had restored order but not peace.      With the familiar balustrade of the Detroit Public Library (above) in the foreground, the U.S. Army heads for Woodward Avenue to break up the riotous mobs that seemed to be growing not only in size but in intensity. There they encountered between 10-15,000 whites, the "great mob" that Jeffries had seen roaming Woodward unabated and administering justice as they pleased. The sight of well armed soldiers, brandishing bayonets quickly brought them to their senses and caused them to scatter pell-mell. Krech ordered his men, "fix your bayonets, load your guns and don't take anything from anyone." Mayor Jeffries post riot critique regarding the city's state of readiness had an ominous ring to it, which would echo across the decades: "We were greenhorns in this area of race riots, but we are greenhorns no longer. We are veterans now. We will not make the same mistakes again." Dead - 34 Arrested - 1,895 Injured - 675 Damage - $2,000,000 ($35 million today) Man hours lost - 1 million Enemies in life but brothers in death, riot victims, both black and white, lay side by side in the Wayne County morgue.    The U.S. Army, fully armed, attend a Tigers game at Briggs Stadium in the days following the riot at the behest of Mayor Jeffries. Needless to say, there were no incidents.    Of the thirty-four confirmed dead, many were killed in the most sadistic fashion possible, that of blunt force trauma. Bludgeoning's and multiple stab wound victims inundated Detroit Receiving Hospital. While killing with a gun is certainly a violent crime, it is much less personal because there is no physical contact. Of course, the greater the distance the less personal the killing. But beating a person to death with a bat or stabbing a victim thirty or forty times indicates a volcanic personal hatred of pathological proportions. This is ultimately what defined the ‘43 riot.  To E-mail me, type your message into the white form blank below and hit "Submit E-mail" button.  If you want a response you must include your name and E-mail address in the body of the message.  It proved to be an uneasy peace, however, and twenty-four years later the army would return, to a city under both different and yet hauntingly familiar circumstances. July 6th - With order now restored, the army musters out of Detroit, down Woodward Avenue and past the DIA reviewing stand which held their commanders, (above, left to right)  General Guthner, Governor Kelly and General Aurand. Sunday June 20 3:30 p.m.  - Little Willie and co. begin maruading rampage around Belle Isle. 4:00          - Patrol car 1 begins busy day investigating reports of black teenagers starting fights. 10:00        - As thousands of patrons begin to leave the island, fights erupt on the Belle Isle bridge. culminating in a donnebrook at the foot of the bridge on the mainland side, attracting the attention of white sailors from the adjacent naval armory who eagerly join in the fracus. 11:00        -  Now some 5,000 (mostly white) at foot of bridge. Riot quickly spreads to nearby streets. 11:30        - Leo Tipton tells a black audiance at the Forest Club that whites have thrown a black women and her child                        off the Belle Isle bridge. This was a false rumor but blacks react by smashing windows of white owned  

                      businesses along Hastings Street,eventually looting them. Whites retaliate by beating blacks along                                   Woodward Avenue. White mob attempts to invade Black Bottom. (Bloody Monday) 12:00 a.m.  Detroit police arrive en mass to break up melee on bridge. Police are unaware of Forest Club incident. 1:00       -  Blacks in Paradise Valley, acting on Tipton rumor, begin assualting white motorists along Warren and                                Vernor. 2:00          Belle Isle brawl is disbanded. Twenty-eight blacks and nineteen whites are arrested. Detroit police believe                        incident is over. 4:00       -  Whites begin stoning black motorists on Woodward and assualt black patrons as they leave Roxy theatre. 11:00          -  White mobs begin reign of terro along Woodward Avenue. 4:00 p.m.  -  U.S. Army Brigadier General Guthner arrives from Wisconsin to meet with the mayor and governor. Guthner balks at prearranged plan to send in federal troops. Insists that martial law must first be declared and only President Roosevelt can do that. This would put Detroit under military rule. 6:00 - 9:00     Mayor Jeffries goes on radio appealing for sanity. Governor Kelly declares a State of Emergency, still unwilling to declare martial law. The bloodiest stretch of the riot ensues. Sixteen are already dead and ten more will die in these three hours. 9:25 p.m.      Kelly speaks with General Aurand, Guthner's superior. A "qualified martial law" is imposed. President Roosevelt, at his home in Hyde Park, signs the hastily prepared document. Aurand orders Guthner to send in U.S. Army troops. Colonel Krech's M.P.'s break up mobs at bayonet point. Detroit police complete seige of Frazer Hotel in which an officer was shot and later dies. Riot begins to wind down. Charles "Little Willie" Lyons One week before the riot, Charles "Little Willie" Lyons was run out of Eastwood amusement park by a group of white teenagers. He vowed revenge. The following Sunday Lyons showed up at Belle Isle, recruited some friends and began a marauding rampage against unsuspecting whites, successfully eluding the police. At 10:00 that night, while crossing the bridge to go home, Lyons punched an unsuspecting white man. Witnessing the event, two white sailors caught up with "Little Willie" and started a riot that would be heard around the world. The Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the 1967 Detroit Riot. Source