I grew up in Detroit, have family there, have relatives burried there going back to the 1870s. The caller may have been a liberal moron, but he is right about the demise of Detroit.
The riots destroyed the city. There are a lot of reasons for this. The riots were race riots, plain and simple. It was black vs. white. The National Guard and State Police were called out to quell them, but failed. This caused the Governor, Mitt Romney’s father to request assistance from the US Army. Elements of the 82nd and 101st Airborne were deployed into Detroit. Light armour was also deployed, mostly along the city limit, 8 mile road, where there was a National Guard armoury. The goal was to create a permiter to contian the riots.
The riots took place, initially in an area near the river, the “Black Bottom” neighborhood, so the city limit was about 8 miles from the nexus of the disturbance.
An unintended consequence of the response was that most of the burnt out businesses and homes got no insurance. Check you insurance policy. They have a ‘war and insurrection’ clause, which by calling out the regular Army raised the status of the riot to something larger. Many in Detroit have always referred to it as “the rebellion of 1967”, and while having a somewhat romantic leftist tinge to it, it does help to differentiate it from more ordinary riots, even big ones like LA, where the glass is swept up and people rebuild.
Much of Detroit that was burnt has never been rebuilt. Some entire neighborhoods were just streets and rubble as late as the late 1980s when I did some tours there. I think they have tried to remove the rubble since then.
The riots triggered white flight. It caused a huge demographic shift. Stores owned by blacks were by and large not looted. Things like “Soul Brother” were spray painted on businesses by blacks, and of cousre most people knew who ran small businesses anyway.
The positioning of the tanks on 8 mile road sent a psychological message: inside this boundary you are a target and not protected.
8 mile has loomed like the Berlin Wall in Detroit ever since. The title of Detroit born rapper Eminem’s autobiographical movie was “8 Mile”, which was instantly understood by Detroiters as the boundary between white and black in the Metro area.
The white flight, in turn led to the election of Coleman Young by the newly empowered black majority. Young was deeply corrupt, antagonized business leaders and white politicians and failed to control the drug gangs, which achieved huge power and wealth in Detroit in the 1980s.
Before the riots Detroit had problems, but it was a vibrant city. After it was a post-apolcolyptic failure.
I agree with the commentator. People who blame 30 years of Democratic rule, or unions, or auto-companies are missing the boat.
It’s the people who live there who killed Detroit - first the subset who rioted, then the majority who elected demagogic politicians and bred several generations of gang bangers (on a scale beyond even places like LA which are more well known for gangs. Most historians of the subject will call out the Detroit drug gagngs of the 1980s as the innovaters who created the genre of gangs as money machines).
Lots of cities have been run by Democrats for 40 years and are pretty nice, if weird. Portland, OR - where I live and Seattle have both raised themselves up a lot in the same time period. It’s disengenuous in the extreme to make these claims, as libertarians always do.
Black people are the group that did the breaking, and have presided over the on-going destruction of Detroit. And there are a whole lot of other black-majority, black-run cities in America that are following the Detroit example.
It’s sad when Conservatives can’t even admit the plain facts. We sound like idiots when we go on and on about the UAW, or auto companies, or even Democrats destroying Detroit. At least to people who were there.
(I *was* there. I was on Belle Isle, a city park in the middle of Detroit when the riots started. And I stayed there for five days as it was too dangerous to cross out once they started. I smelled the smoke, saw the Army.)
And it all makes sense.
Thanks!!
I guess I might send your replies to Mark Levin...because that's the show the guy called.
Appreciate it........
“Black people are the group that did the breaking, and have presided over the on-going destruction of Detroit. And there are a whole lot of other black-majority, black-run cities in America that are following the Detroit example.”
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That undenaiable TRUTH is not going to sit well with the “LBJ’s Great Society completely at fault” crowd here on FR.
It is indeed about PERSONAL choice and responsibility.