What a great city it was. Growing up there in the fifties and sixties I remember a sprawling, wealthy, huge conglomerate of a city. Hudson’s...downtown, the Olympia where we watched the Red Wings...Briggs, later called Tiger Stadium...baseball and football.
It all began to end in July, 1967 when the decision was made at the highest levels of city and state government to not protect property during the riot...excuse me, civil insurrection.
George Romney and Jerry Cavanaugh allowed the city to burn...over forty people died anyway...and tens of thousands began to move out. Heck...Sterling Heights, er...I mean Sterling Whites was just farm land until then.
By the seventies when Coleman Young became mayor...he was a black racist...it was game over. Political pay to play became the order of the day, and that never ended. Corruption remains at incredible levels...not that the justice department is much interested.
Those left now live behind bars over their windows and doors. Nine years ago the Detroit Police told me to move my elderly mother out of the city before she got hurt.
I did. She’s safe now...but misses her old neighborhood...not that it’s there anymore.
When I go back and drive through what’s left, only in daylight, I cry. I mean...I actually weep. It’s sickening.
Fifty years of Democrat leadership.
I’m from that neck of the woods. It’s tragic.
From Detroit as well. Truer words never written.