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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/nolan-finley/2014/11/27/
finley-compares-ferguson-detroit/19553321/
Finley: Ferguson's future is Detroit's past
Nolan Finley, The Detroit News 8:39 a.m. EST November 27, 2014
-detriots194.jpg_20090506.jpg
Justice isn't achieved by burning down a city. All that comes from torching a community in the name of justice is ... Detroit.
Ferguson, Missouri, can see its future by looking at Detroit's past. It's been nearly 50 years since angry, black Detroiters set fire to their city to express their frustration with a system that was stacked against them. And Detroit still hasn't recovered. The acceleration of abandonment and blight triggered by the 1967 riot is only now being confronted.
In the years after the riot, Detroit moved rapidly from an integrated community to the most segregated city in America.
It lost its white middle class, and also its small businesses, and ultimately its larger ones. A collapsing tax base destroyed city services. A concentration of high-poverty students and shrinking resources laid waste to a school system that once offered salvation to African-American children. And then the black middle class fled.
Investors wrote off Detroit as hopeless. While the suburbs grew and flourished, the core city withered and nearly died. It became a predominately poor, mostly black city with too many social problems and too little resources to solve them.
It's hard to imagine Ferguson will fare any better than Detroit.
Like the Motor City in the '60s, Ferguson has been transitioning from a majority white to a majority black population over the past 25 years. It's now two-thirds African-American.
And also like Detroit of that era, the structures of government haven't kept pace. Just three of the 53 officers on the Ferguson police force are black, and even before the fatal shooting of a black teenager by a white cop, there was tension between the community and police.
Detroit's riot was sparked by a raid on an after-hours blind pig. Ferguson's came in reaction to a grand jury's decision not to issue charges against Darren Wilson, the cop who shot Michael Brown.
Detroit's rampage was spontaneous. Ferguson's less so. The town of 21,000 outside of St. Louis has been flooded since the August shooting with anarchists and outside agitators who have been plotting their response to the grand jury announcement for weeks.
But in both cities, failure to get ahead of resentment and inequities, ignoring the divisions that develop as the racial makeup of communities change and maintaining a police force with little understanding of the people it is supposed to serve and protect provided the fuel for the explosions.
Now, Ferguson's business district is smoking, its streets are filled with angry protesters and Al Sharpton has moved his circus into town.
Worse, the name Ferguson is synonymous with racial discord. As Detroit showed, that's not an easy mark to erase.
And just like in Detroit, the people who will suffer the most in Ferguson are the impoverished African-Americans who won't be able to escape the city when it becomes unlivable.
That's what happens when people think they can find justice by striking a match.
nfinley@detroitnews.com
(313)222-2064
Follow Nolan Finley at detroitnews.com/finley, on Twitter at nolanfinleydn, on Facebook at nolanfinleydetnews and watch him at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays on "MiWeek" on Detroit Public TV, Channel 56. |
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Fri Nov 28, 2014 12:10 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/11/looking-back-ferguson-and-the-detroit-riots/
Looking back: Ferguson and the Detroit riots
Posted by Leslie Eastman Wednesday, November 26, 2014 at 10:30am
Comparing 1967 Detroit to Ferguson today reveals stark differences.
LI #27 Detroit 1967
One of my most haunting memories from childhood involves a group of teens from a local Michigan high school; they pounded on our front door and begged my mom to call the police. This was during the 1967 Detroit Riots, when several groups of hostile students decided to take the conflict into our small suburb.
My father was away, working as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, and his team’s coverage of this event lead to a Pulitzer Prize. My mom took the students in, made the call, and comforted everyone until parents arrived to pick up the group who fled to our doorstep.
A short summary of this event via PBS shows seems similar to what unfolded yesterday:
For five days in July, Detroit, Michigan descends into chaos. An economic boom has created jobs, and urban renewal projects have built new infrastructure, but blacks have been left behind. New expressways destroy black neighborhoods, and economic opportunities are scarce for black residents. The 95% white police force, notorious for brutal and arbitrary treatment of black citizens, raids an illegal after hours club and draws an angry, frustrated crowd that quickly turns hostile.
As Sunday July 23rd dawns, the growing crowd is looting and burning the city. Twelve hours into the frenzy, Governor George Romney calls in the Michigan National Guard; unprepared troops make mistakes like shooting out the street lights. Nearly 4000 people will be arrested in the first two days, and over 7000 by the third. Most are young and black. Police and guardsmen shoot at will, with some later insisting that all of their victims were armed.
Some footage from the station, WXYZ, and covered by two of the areas best-known reporters of that era:
Now, not even 50 years later, the race-baiters and societal malcontents have ginned up tensions in hopes of creating another iconic civil rights moment in Ferguson. However, there are stark differences between then and now:
•There has been no years of “economic boom” under this administration, especially in Detroit (undergoing a Chapter 9 bankruptcy).
•The real evidence in the Ferguson points to a hard-working police officer defending himself from an attack by a suspected robber of considerable size and strength, not police brutality.
•Reverse racism is notorious, such as the time the City Council President Monica Conyers, advised whites to “go home” from a meeting. She also rebuked a Teamster official begging to get approval for a project that would create more good-paying jobs for union workers by noting , “Those workers look like you; they don’t look like me.”
•Images from social media show the looters as the self-centered criminals that they are, and not civil rights heroes.
I followed the news with a great deal of apprehension today, recalling the 1967 violence. I am somewhat relieved to learn that, even in Detroit, the protests are relatively peaceable.
The demonstrators carried picket signs and chanted outside the federal courthouse on West Lafayette downtown, “Hey, hey … ho, ho … killer cops have got to go,” and “What do we want? Justice!” under the watchful eyes of federal security officers and top city police officials.
“We’ve very upset,” the Rev. Charles Williams III said. “Our concern is that there was no trial.”
The [Detroit] rally was one of 28 that took place in cities across the country. Williams said “a national mobilization” is being planned as part of a larger demonstration against the grand jury’s decision, which he said was unjust.
Hopefully, those interested in true justice will ignore the agitators from the Communist party, HAMAS, and Anonymous and eventually come to accept the Grand Jury returned a just verdict in this case.
The elite media may want to recreate the 1960′s, but that time has long gone — as have the real heroes of that era. |
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Fri Nov 28, 2014 12:15 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.abc12.com/story/27491916/a-look-back-at-the-1967-detroit-riots
A look back at the 1967 Detroit riots
Posted: Nov 26, 2014 5:08 PM CST
Updated: Nov 26, 2014 5:59 PM CST
By Dawn Jones
DETROIT (WJRT) - (11/26/14) - What's happening in Ferguson brings to mind what happened on the streets of Detroit more than four decades ago - when riots broke out following a police raid.
Forty-three people died, hundreds were injured and entire neighborhoods were burned down.
Unlike Detroit in 1967, Ferguson has not suffered any loss of life due to the civil unrest that's unfolding in the city. But much like Detroit, a police incident has once again sparked outrage in a community that has reached its tipping point.
In July of 1967, the city of Detroit erupted.
Detroit police raided an after-hours club, or blind pig in the African American Community, sparking days of rioting
"They were breaking the windows and stealing, we could hear gunshots, bullets came through into our building at some point, we could hear shooting all night long - the smoke and flames from the buildings burning - it was just unreal, it was hard to process.," said Jerry Hodak, retired meteorologist.
Hodak is a native Detroiter and was young reporter in the city during the the '67 riots. The images of that tumultuous time are still very fresh in his memory.
"Certainly it effected me and I watched Army tanks roll down Woodward Avenue. I never expected to see that in my lifetime," he said.
Nearly 50 years later, Hodak is witnessing history repeat itself - but this time hundreds of miles away in Ferguson, Missouri.
Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed an unarmed black teen last summer and a grand jury found no probable cause to charge him.
"So there are similarities. It involved a police incident and it involved people rioting and looting and shooting and things like that," Hodak said.
Educator Tendaji Ganges says these reactions are the result of people suffering from decades of micro aggressions.
"They are the little death by a thousand cuts. We call it the little indignities, the results of ongoing oppressions, but they are the little things that happen every day," he said.
When everyday injustices are not addressed or resolved - there will be a tipping point.
"What happens is like water up against a dam, it builds up and they wear. And eventually what happens is they overflow or break the dam loose," Ganges said.
History has shown that when the dam breaks loose, bottled up frustrations can turn into outward rage.
"You are mentally ill for a moment and you do strange things. Throw things through the window, bust up things, break things, all of us have done it or said it at one time or another. Just take a pen and throw it down," Ganges said.
As the residents of Ferguson look to rebuild, the question remains - how do we keep history from repeating itself?
"We have to understand what's going on. We are not delving into what is impacting people, what they are living every day, how they are struggling with the pain," Ganges said.
Ganges goes on to say if we fail to learn the lessons of the past, history will undoubtedly repeat itself. |
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Fri Nov 28, 2014 12:23 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/segregation-city-chicago-60s
Article
Segregation City: Chicago in the 60s
Chicago, like the rest of the North, was not a racial paradise.
By Robert Fanuzzi
Grades: 3–5, 6–8
Scholastic Search
A police raid on a bar. A fire hydrant turned off. In the mid-1960s, that's all it took to start a race war. And it was not uncommon, from 1965 to 1968, to see blacks battling white police in the streets of northern cities. When the last shot was fired, hundreds were dead and thousands wounded.
The urban riots exposed the awful truth. Segregation was everywhere, not just in southern schools. In the North, it was called the black ghetto, a place where jobs were scarce and poverty rampant. And in few places was the ghetto bigger or the conditions worse than in Chicago.
During World War I, when black farmers in the South sickened of poverty and racial violence, they looked to Chicago. Factories were opening by the dozens, and thousands of rural blacks came north hoping for jobs. By the end of the war, the city's South Side had so many black residents that people called it "Bronzeville."
The Bronzeville Attitude
If you lived in Bronzeville, you could go to black banks, shop in black stores, vote for black politicians. You could strut down broad avenues, dressed to the teeth, showing off what they called "The Attitude." You could point with pride to Joe Louis, the boxing champion, and Muddy Waters, the master of rhythm and blues.
But you also couldn't live outside the ghetto. Starting in 1917, realtors made "restrictive covenants," vowing privately not to sell houses in white neighborhoods to black families. When blacks tried to move beyond Bronzeville, whites used violence to keep them in. In 1951, a mob burned down an entire building to evict its single black resident.
Closed in by white neighborhoods, Bronzeville quickly grew overcrowded. One-family apartments were split into three tiny "kitchenettes." Everyone went down the hall to use the toilet — if the plumbing worked. Owners did not have to repair their buildings because city inspectors could be bribed. And no one stopped them from raising the rents.
High-rise public housing was the government's solution to the housing crisis. But these projects did nothing to fight residential segregation; by 1950, Chicago officials had decided to build low-income housing only in the black ghetto.
To the people living there, it seemed that there was no way out. Blacks were cut off from the best paying jobs; in 1965, for example, they held only 5 percent of the high-paying positions for trained professionals. On the other end of the scale, laborers were faced with layoffs as hundreds of factories in the city closed during the 1950s and 60s.
By the 1960s, residents of the ghettos were boiling with rage. "They not let us in, we be OUT," one gang leader said. In 1965, the projects exploded. When white firemen ran over a black women in a West Side ghetto, the residents went on a rampage. They attacked the two sources of power that whites had over them — the police and the white-owned stores — by putting "Soul Brother" stickers on their windows. Even more violent riots occurred in 1966 and 1968. Each had a different spark, but the ghetto residents in all cases felt they were rebelling against an unfair system.
The "system" did little to convince them otherwise. During the 1968 riot following Martin Luther King's death, Mayor Richard Daley gave his police orders to "shoot to kill." Daley also tried to pacify angry blacks with welfare programs.
But many ghetto residents were tired of favors. They wanted to own their own stores, have black policemen, and elect black leaders. Their successes were few and far between. In Chicago, and in many other northern cities, blacks and whites remain as divided today as they were in the decade of the great riots. |
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Thu Dec 04, 2014 9:06 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://thenat.in/1wAYLd0
Third-rail politics: Analysis at the intersection of gender, health and race.
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The Civil Rights Movement Came Out of a Moment Like This One
Dani McClain on December 4, 2014 - 5:47 PM ET
In this August 28, 1963 file photo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington. (AP Photo/File)
Back in August, some observers drew comparisons between the shooting of Michael Brown by Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. If parallels to civil rights movement history are helpful now, then let yesterday’s announcement that a Staten Island grand jury won’t indict the police officer who choked Eric Garner to death be a sign that we’re somewhere closer to 1963—when a series of devastating setbacks and subsequent widespread outrage transformed the civil rights struggle—than we are to Till’s lynching, that earlier consciousness-raising moment. There was a perfect storm this week: the continuing fallout of the failed indictment of Wilson; the news of the outcome in the Garner case; a Cleveland newspaper’s efforts to discredit and sling mud on the parents of a 12-year-old boy killed by police. This moment has the potential to catapult change, just as a series of events that transpired eight years after Till was killed did.
The murder of 14-year-old Till and the 1963 murder of four black girls at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church both became national stories that hit Americans square in the chest, reminding them of the Jim Crow system of justice in which black people had no rights that whites were bound to respect. With the killings of Garner, Brown, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice and others, we are all reminded that black life is still too often devalued, and that police officers are often not subject to the rule of law. That reminder has packed a similar emotional wallop. It is all coming so quickly: these announcements that a trial isn’t even needed to determine the police officer’s guilt or innocence. These exonerations through other means. People are taking to the streets nationwide to protest: just last night saw an outpouring of response in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and beyond.
But one problem, as my colleague Zoë Carpenter noted yesterday, is that some who are protesting are wondering how to turn these coordinated actions into a movement. From a DC community townhall meeting, Carpenter reports:
[Eugene] Puryear noted that the gap between protest and large-term organizing still has to be bridged. “Right now, just to be honest, we have tactics—we do not have strategy. We are doing a lot of interesting things and a lot of important things…but ultimately, where is it going? What are we doing? What are we really asking for?” he asked. “We’re ready to get arrested, and I love that. I’m ready. But are we ready to build institutions?”
These are critical questions. During the first four years of the Obama administration, I worked at a social justice organization that uses online organizing tactics to engage people in civil rights and racial justice campaigns. The work was and continues to be important and often successful, but far too often, it felt like we were responding to news events rather than setting the agenda. Someone would say something nauseatingly racist about the president, and we would respond. A law would be at risk of being stripped of a key provision, and we would try to pressure responsible parties. But the questions I kept coming back to were: When do we craft and push for the next Civil Rights Act? The next Voting Rights Act? How do we keep playing this necessary defense—while also going hard on offense? How do we identify the deep, structural problems, if only one at a time, and devise plans to solve them? In other words, when do we start to think big like the A. Philip Randolphs, Bayard Rustins, Ella Bakers and other brilliant strategists of yesteryear?
The group of young organizers who have been active in Ferguson and who earlier this week met with President Obama and members his administration are starting to answer these questions. Among the demands put forth by activists from organizations including Millennial Activists United, Ohio Students Association, Dream Defenders, Make the Road New York are for:
•The federal government to use its power to prosecute police officers that kill or abuse people.
•The removal of local district attorneys from the job of holding police accountable, and instead having independent prosecutors at the local level charged with prosecuting officers.
•The defunding of local police departments that use excessive force or racially profile. Instead of having the Department of Justice (DOJ) wholesale giving more than $250 million to local police departments annually, DOJ should only fund departments that agree to adopt DOJ best practices for training and meaningful community input.
These demands take a step toward vision and big thinking—a commitment to playing offense and addressing the problems at their roots—that we need right now. If we take history as our guide, it’s worth noting that public outcry in response to the rapid fire events of 1963 is credited with making the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act inevitable. The four little girls were killed in September of that year in a place already dubbed “Bombingham” for the level of racist backlash to the small steps toward progress the city was making. King had been jailed there in the spring of that year. Medgar Evers had been assassinated that summer in Mississippi. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had happened not even a month before the church bombing, and had shown the world that a critical mass of people were mobilized in the service of fundamental change.
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Granted, those dead at the hands of police today are not civil rights leaders, or children killed in their place of worship. For some observers, these more recent victims are unsympathetic: they were involved in roughing up a bodega owner or selling untaxed cigarettes. But for others, we find ourselves at a similar moment fifty years after that critical turning point in civil rights movement history—with “Again?” on our lips and a familiar feeling of dread in response to the violence we witness on the video of the killing of Eric Garner, the incredible amount of force used on a man who announced over and over again, “I can’t breathe.”
What would it take to scrap and rebuild a system that makes it nearly impossible to indict an officer when he or she kills a civilian? What is the landmark legislation that all this fury in the streets can demand and drive? Some of the organizers and strategists who are responsible for the displays of coordinated, righteous protest are putting their minds on these questions. The sense of being up against an unchangeable justice system designed to brutalize black life at the slightest perception of provocation can make one feel that the United States has proven itself to be a failed political experiment, one in which some people’s rights will never be secured. But if the history of this country’s most revered revolutionary period is any guide—and if a policy program is developed to channel all this growing energy—then we’re just getting started. |
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Sat Dec 06, 2014 6:24 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30284312\
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BBC News US & Canada
2 December 2014 Last updated at 13:51 ET
The civil rights movement in the 1960s fought unjust laws. Can a modern movement brought on by the events in Ferguson, Missouri, take on a more ambiguous target? Journalist Ellis Cose examines the modern struggles of those protesting for racial equity.
We have been here far too many times - police confront black males, something goes horribly awry, and racial tensions roil the nation. All that changes are the details.
In this case, Michael Brown ended up dead as his companion ran in fear. Always, in the aftermath, there is agony and confusion as a community rises up demanding change that never fully comes.
Over the past half century or so, we have seen the pattern repeated countless times. So many of the riots of the 1960s - those uprisings that came to characterise the so-called long hot summers - were set off by encounters between police and civilians of colour. Those incidents continue to occur all too frequently, and all too frequently they end in death.
The journalism group ProPublica recently revealed that young black men were 21 times more likely than young white men of being gunned down by police.
Michael Brown's father Brown's father (centre) has called for peace, but he is also more likely to be stereotyped as aggressive
One obvious reason for the disparity is that blacks are more likely to live in high-crime neighbourhoods; so law enforcement officials are especially likely to feel threatened and therefore to draw their guns. An even more obvious reason is that black youths are more prone to be perceived as hulking brutes.
The election of Barack Obama gave rise to much talk of a post-racial society, of an America where blacks, Latinos, and other people of colours were no longer judged or hindered by race. There is something to that notion. Yet we continue to perceive race and racial differences in the same way we perceive differences - and make judgments - about other aspects of appearance and status. As a number of studies have made clear, even when job applicants present exactly the same credentials whites tend to be preferred.
“
Start Quote
We have arrived at a moment when something has to change. Brown's death, after all, did not occur in a vacuum. ”
End Quote
This is not to say that race always rules. If someone looking like Barack Obama happened to be walking down a city street, virtually no police officer would see him as a threat worth shooting. His expensive suit and middle-aged status would merit a measure of deference. But for a young black man in casual clothes on a dark street in a presumably dangerous neighbourhood, reality would be quite different.
This country has a history of endowing such men with an almost mythical aura of menace.
To get some sense of how this plays out, one need only review the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson, who defended killing Michael Brown by describing Brown as an inhuman, unstoppable beast. "It looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I'm shooting at him."
This stereotype of the hulking black brute, impervious to pain, capable of crushing strong white men with a single slap of his massive hand has been with us for a very long time.
More than a century ago, Clifton R Breckinridge, a former congressman who had been President Grover Cleveland's minister to Russia, observed that the black race was "the most negative and tractable of which we have any considerable knowledge" and went on to declare, "When it produces a brute, he is the worse and most insatiable brute that exists in human form."
What should Ferguson mothers tell their children?
Much as things have changed in America - and they have changed hugely since that analysis was published in 1900 - the image of the hulking, menacing black brute still haunts us; and it is getting young black men killed.
As rational human beings, we need to attack that stereotype with the same resolve and determination that Officer Wilson brought to his encounter with Michael Brown. Perhaps the protests spawned by Brown's death and Wilson's grand-jury exoneration are a sign that some among us are prepared to do just that.
But this movement is much more complicated than the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
What it shares with that movement is a sense that we have arrived at a moment when something has to change. Brown's death, after all, did not occur in a vacuum. It occurred on the heels of several arguably unjustified killings of black men by police or self-declared enforcers of order. Eric Garner was killed in Staten Island after being caught selling untaxed cigarettes. Trayvon Martin was shot by a gun-toting vigilante simply because he seemed suspicious.
Protesters at a "die in" in Washington DC Protests in Washington, DC, continued days after the grand jury decision in Ferguson
Bloody Sunday, in which a civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, culminated in a police riot, led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
It would be great if this movement could bring about something similarly concrete.
But how do you legislate against stereotypes, against people, some of them with uniforms and guns, acting on poisonous perceptions? Rather than the mid-century civil rights movement, this new movement is more akin to (and, indeed, can be seen as allied with) the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the anti-mass-incarceration movement.
It is a growing and collective howl of outrage raised against some things that are seriously wrong in the American system.
That outrage, I like to believe, is registering in some deep part of the American consciousness and will ultimately lead to self-healing.
But unfortunately, this sickness has no immediate remedy.
Ellis Cose, author of The End of Anger: A New Generation's Take on Race and Rage and numerous other books, is currently writing a memoir. |
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Sat Dec 06, 2014 6:34 pm |
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