Posted on Saturday, July 21, 2007 - 6:16 pm:

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I'm sorry but you can still make the decision to better yourself instead of just saying "I was born into a poor family so that's what I choose to remain."
My dad worked on a loading dock in Detroit, my Mom was a maid. I worked two jobs and paid my way through college. Wealth is a relative term in that it doesn't have to mean "rich people" but can easily mean a comfortable living, not wanting for the basics, a good family life. Even if you're born without that you can SURE work toward it.

Posted on Sunday, July 22, 2007 - 2:19 pm:

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In 1966, 38 percent of inner-city businesses were actually black-owned, but these stores tended to be small retail businesses of the "mom and pop" variety. At the time of the 1967 riot, Jews owned less than 15 percent of the stores in the principal riot area. Jewish merchants, however, owned many of the larger, more prosperous businesses on the west side. They tended to be older persons who had remained behind when the Jewish middle class moved out of the area in the 1950s. As they retired or gave up their businesses for one reason or another, they were often replaced by Chaldeans (Catholic immigrants from Iraq).

unemployment rose in 1967 and more so in July, the month of the riot. The monthly average unemployment rate in the Detroit area for the fiscal year July 1966 to June 1967 was 3.9 percent, but the June 1967 figure was 4.8 percent and the July figure, 6.2 percent, a five-year high. The black unemployment rate was about 8 percent in July, and the rate in what became the riot areas, 11 percent or more. The highest unemployment rate at the time of the riot, probably between 25 and 30 percent, was among black youths aged eighteen to twenty-four.

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When the Detroit riot began at Twelfth and Clairmount, Tom Johnson, the head of the Civil Rights Commission's staff, conceded that he had had "no indication" that a riot was coming. He recalled, however, that in 1966 his office had pointed to Twelfth and Clairmount as "the most likely trouble spot in the city." The Summer Task Force and the police commissioner had also anticipated that Twelfth Street would be the site if Detroit were to fall victim to the riot fever.

Those who saw Twelfth Street as the likely location for a riot were undoubtedly referring to the poorest and most crime-ridden census tracts in the Twelfth Street environs rather than to the Virgina Park area as a whole or the more extensive area on the west side to which the riot actually spread.

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the quality of life in the Twelfth Street area was vastly superior to that in the model city neighborhood inside the Boulevard, was somewhat better than that of Target Area 4b, but was decidedly inferior to that of the city as a whole. Census Tract 187 (bounded by Woodrow Wilson on the east, Fourteenth on the west, Euclid on the south, and Gladstone on the north) was the Twelfth Street neighborhood at its worst. Here, where the population of 4,893 was 98 percent black, the median family income in 1965 was $4,000, and the unemployment rate was 10 percent, triple the nonwhite rate for the city and six times as high as the white rate. Only 17 percent of the dwellings in the tract were owner-occupied, far below the percentage for nonwhites and whites in the city as a whole. The population density of the Virgina Park area was twice that of the city as a whole, but the 137 persons per residential acre in Census Tract 187 was more than three times as high. Census Tract 187 was one of the most congested in the entire city, a fact of some importance in explaining the beginning of the riot.

In a survey conducted between October 1966 and February 1967, 84 percent of the inhabitants of Census Tract 187 did not care for their neighborhood, and 92 percent wanted to move to another neighborhood. Seventy-two percent thought the neighborhood was "not too safe" or "not safe at all"; 91 percent said they were "somewhat or very likely" "to get robbed/beaten at night"; 80 percent were dissatisfied with the recreational facilities available in the area; and 33 percent were unhappy about the education their children were receiving. Whereas 48 percent of the blacks in a well-to-do census tract in 1965 indicated that the police would respond to a call about "housebreaking" in their neighborhood in ten minutes or less, only 22 percent in Census Tract 187 were of that opinion.
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As the riot revealed, there were some blacks living in the neighborhood called Twelfth Street who felt they had "nothing to lose" by the riot but also others who wanted to protect what they had. There were those who made a determined effort to defend their homes, offering protection to firemen being pelted by the rioters, and there was the black who said, "Man, how can you call this place a home? This ain't no mother-fucking home. This is a prison. I'd just as soon burn down this damn place as any other."

As survey data gathered in the main following the riot made clear, many blacks in the areas of the city where the riot centered were dissatisfied with the quality of their housing, the city's urban renewal program, the nature of code enforcement, the quality of education provided by the public schools, the lack of recreational space in their neighborhoods, the character of their jobs, the practices of the merchants with whom they dealt, and above all, the behavior of the police. Influenced by the civil rights movement, rising black self-consciousness, and rioting elsewhere, they were less willing than blacks had been to put up with conditions that had long been their lot even though those conditions had improved and even though they were better off, on the average, than blacks elsewhere in the nation. Their grievances were no doubt accentuated by the rising unemployment that, as we have seen, reached 11 percent in the disorder area in July and perhaps 25 to 30 percent among the crucial eighteen to twenty-four-year-old group.

Sixteen cities,according to the calculations of Bryan T. Downes, experienced racial disorders in 1964, twenty in 1965, and forty-four in 1966. In the first six months of 1967, according to a much broader definition of "disorder" used by the Kerner Commission, there were thirty-three disorders in the nation, three of them major. In July, when the racial turbulence reached its peak, there were 103 disorders, 5 of them major. Newark experienced a major riot between July 12 and July 17 that followed the arrest of a cab driver. Six days later the "worst civil disorder" experienced by an American city in the twentieth century began in Detroit following a police raid on a blind pig.

Posted on Sunday, July 22, 2007 - 10:31 pm:

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Local FOX2 has a special tonight at 10:30 about the riot.