Motor Cities Burning People. Most who know this song are more familiar with the heavy cover version by the MC5, released 2 years after the original. For me, this is loads better.
The song depicts the 1967 riots, which left urban neighbourhoods in flames, and 43 dead. The MC5 version in particular glorifies the role of black snipers who fought a battle, first with Detroit PD, then the Michigan National Guard, and finally with the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. I was always baffled why people would burn their own communities.
The proximal causes of the rioting were predictable; tensions between the police, who were almost exclusively white, and black residents. But the story goes back longer than that.
Modern Detroit, like Chicago, was born of the great migration; the movement of six million African Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970. The reasons for the shift in population were straight forward, fleeing discrimination and seeking jobs.
Detroit, however, had a crucial difference to Chicago, rural whites moved north too, looking for work in the car plants, bringing with them discrimination and the Ku Klux Klan. Malcolm X’s father was killed by the Klan’s Detroit chapter.
This created massive discrimination in housing, with black residents concentrated in urban neighbourhoods, surrounded by white suburbs.
Detroit wasn’t totally racist - it had a powerful civil rights movement, and by 1967 had two black congressmen, but the City remained racist and racially divided. Rosa Parks lived in Detroit in the 60s and described it as as segregated as the deep South.
From the late 50s onwards the City had tried to redevelop urban black neighbourhoods, moving the population to housing projects on the outskirts of the city, far from jobs and amenities. Some residents, particularly shop-keepers stayed on as communities became derelict and abandoned. Predictably the city council ran out of funds for the most ambitious aspects of the redevelopment leaving partially abandoned neighbourhoods. Some parts of central Detroit are still derelict to this day.
Equally predictably these empty buildings were taken over by the homeless, drug addicts, gangs, and and over time black Vets returning from Vietnam. It was the latter group who, radicalised by their experiences of racism, and experienced in combat who would turn a dispute with the police into the worst rioting American had seen in nearly a century.
Their main tactic was to set fire to a building deep in a derelict urban neighbourhood. When fire trucks turned up the snipers would shoot out their tyres, forcing a response from the Detroit PD. When they found their tyres shot out, pinned down under fire the National Guard would arrive.
The USA had a draft system in place calling up young men to fight in Vietnam. Wealthy young white men were able to join the National Guard, avoiding overseas deployment. As a result with National Guard was white, well equipped but inexperienced, on the other side were Black Veterans, black, poor, and equipped with whatever guns they could get hold of, including snipers rifles smuggled back for use in hunting. Crucially while they were out numbered and outgunned, they were experienced, and they had learned a key tactic from the Viet Gong - the ability to vanish into the civilian population.
Police responded with brutal force, including the killings at the Algiers Motel, which only increased the anger.
There were probably never more than 12 snipers and a few thousand rioters, but they created terror and fought off the National Guard, tanks and all, for weeks. Only the arrival of regular troops ended the conflict. Most of the snipers vanished into the community and were never charged.
This might just be an interesting history lesson, but it does show how much disruption and carnage a small number of combat veterans with the right equipment can have in an urban area. The US is a much more highly armed society now than it ever was, and the use of guns in massacres is a part of American life.
There have been there waves of political violence in the USA. The first was in the aftermath of reconstruction when 40,000 black men were lynched. The second was in the 1960s when the civil rights movement was met with assassination, murder, and violent repression.
The third period is now, an age when police and white militias are able to kill young black men with impunity.
Motor City might well burn again