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In a message dated 10/14/2004 4:28:39 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>>GETTING IT STRAIGHT: The Free Press corrects all errors of fact. On July 24, 1967, two articles about the Detroit riot incorrectly reported its origin as a clash with police at 9215 Twelfth Street. In fact, the illegal after-hours club where the clash took place was farther south at 9125. And the anger that exploded that night had been simmering for a long time.
Today, there is not so much as a historical marker in the little park at Twelfth Street and Clairmount on Detroit's near-west side, the spot where one of the worst racial disturbances in U.S. history erupted on a summer night.<<
Comment
Damn Charles this material you have been presenting is excellent. I hav ben writing a series for the A-List on the so-called Negro Question and just finished what is part 15 . . . really.
In Detroit, Michigan, forever my home town, 12th Street and Clairmount, then going South is the historic black business district after the other historic black business district was wiped up under the rubric of Urban Renewal. This was Paradise Valley on the East side, around Russell, wiped out by a City County vote to build the new freeway - 1-75, through the black business district. Eastern Market on Gratiot borders this area on the south and the North border flows down to the Henry Ford freeway.
Young's - Clomen Young Jr., Bar be Q joint is still ocated in this area which is right around the corner from the old Packard Plant.
This was the heart of the old "chitlin circuit" where you could shop and not be harrassed by white peoples and on the weekends take your women out to party and get a drink and dance without having to worry about white people trying to "rush you" and kill a black mutherfucker for nothing.
Sorry brother for my straight forwardness but why am I to pretend?
1967 Detroit and 12th Street and Clairmount. One block and a half south of Clairmount on 12th is where the hot tamales man sold his goods. A couple of blocks further South was Joe's Record Shop. Joe had recorded Martin Lutjher King Jr. first albums and Aretha Franklin and jazz artist that would become great.
I was all of 15 years old in 1967, but I had money in my pocket from two paper routes, gambling in school, working the car wash - Jacks at 14 1/2 mile and Woodward on the weekends, and was the "big man on the block" with all the latest Marvel comics.
This gets complicated because I remember when Martin Luther King gave the first version of his speech in Detroit that would be repeated and perfected at this famous "March on Washington." I remember it because I was there to hear it. What is remembered is how the police kicked our natural asses for nothing. The "Originals" song on behalf of Motown but all I remember is running from the police. The police was on foot and horses hitting a mutherfucker in the head for nothing. Needles to say I did not like the idea of being hit in the head . . . period.
As I got older I began to understand that Detroit 1967 was part of a political continuum. Lou P. can probably explain this better because he is the super/supra Trotskyite that can explain everything, and explain nothing.
At age 15, I did not know that what was taking place was a political continuum rooted in the defeat of Reconstruction. Nor did I know that what I was experiencing was directly related to Birmingham 1963 and Watts 1965. I did not know this in 1967.
What I did know was "fuck you" and fight the oppressors to the death.
See . . . the anger of the Anglo American people is complex but an aspect of it is that they can no longer prosper on the privileges carved ut of the back of the non sovereign and colonial peoples based first and foremost on the ex-slave and agricultural relations of the South.
We have to teach them class . . . you and me, and fuck all that liberal bourgeois intellectual bullshit. The intelligencia scared of white people - real working white people of poverty, and this is right up our alley.
Here is part of our fundamental task as communists.
Man . . . the story of Detroit is fascinating and worth knowing.
Melvin P.
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