A Column By John Sinclair
Hi everybody and welcome once again to Detroit, the former Motor City to which I’ve been confined for health reasons for the past three years. I’m in my last stage of recovery from open heart surgery in mid-February and just got a clean bill of health from my terrific doctor, Dr. Muhammad Kang of the Rosa Parks Geriatric Center at Detroit Receiving Hospital in the Detroit Medical Center, just blocks from my apartment off of Woodard Avenue.
When I sat down to start writing this column I checked the date and saw that today is July 23, an important point in our city’s long history where the African American population (then known as “blacks”) rose up against the Detroit Police Department and its eventual reinforcements from the Michigan State Police, the National Guard and the U.S. Army.
Looking in my files for something else, I came across the following document that served as my Coat Puller column for the Fifth Estate newspaper in the first week of August 1967. I liked it and thought you might get a kick out of it too.
THE COAT PULLER
“You know that it would be untrue / You know that I would be a liar / If I was to say to you / ‘Girl, we can’t get much higher’—/ Come on baby light my fire / Come on baby light my fire / Gonna set the night on/FI-YUR”
—”Light My Fire,” The Doors
“Light My Fire” rises through the radio ranks for weeks and, when it hits number one on the stations, the people respond and burn the city down. Or play Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music” album as background music for the Detroit purification: the scope and feeling of the people’s mood is there; an elegy for Malcolm X.
The television people are scared and stand frowning in doorways, sit clenching their teeth in front of their sets, as the news makes its way through the burning city—the police can’t hold them, the STATE police can’t hold them, the Michigan National Guard can’t hold them, “bring in the Federal Troops, we gotta stop them crazy niggers before they tear the whole city apart and carry it back to their living rooms piece by piece.”
Soldiers in battle green and tommyguns hold down the banks and furniture stores where there’s still furniture, gun shops, troops massed at the Woodward Hudson’s entrances to keep the plastic castle safe from lawless, pillaging looting criminals the governor and the President of the U-nited States call them on TV, and still the fires burn, the stores fall, the people set the night on fire.
You can watch it on TV if you like, a new taste of instant reality for the folks back home—but the bad guys are throwing rocks at the good guys’ cameras and it gets kinda scary out there for us good folk, doesn’t it? Still it’s weird to turn on the set and watch your own city burn down, shots and sounds of the rioting alternated with “The Guiding Light” and the early morning golf lesson just like the world was carrying on business as usual, except there’s news every hour now and the reporters for once don’t have to make it all up, they’ve got something more real than they can handle screaming at them and calling their names.
No, baby, it’s not a “race riot,” or anything as simple as that. People just got tired of being hassled by police and cheated by businessmen and got out their equalizers and went to town. The mode of the music changed and the walls of the city shook and fell. Yes they did. Oh it was Robin Hood Day in merry olde Detroit, the first annual city—wide all—free fire sale, and the people without got their hands on the goodies.
Whole families climbed through A&P windows and picked the stores clean, carting home the groceries they’d been paying their lives for all these years. Free furniture and color TVs, guitars and leather coats, shoes and clothes and liquor. And when their energies turned from smashing the stores they would go for the police, and not, you’ll notice, their neighbors. The dirty, rotten hated police who came to bring a “law and order” made for the owners and bosses and bigshots to protect their precious property. Just now someone tells me, “If there was any hatred, it came from the cops—the people weren’t hostile at all.”
The people just wanted what was theirs all along. They’d been waiting long enough, and it was time now to do it. On a lovely hot Sunday morning they saw the hated po-lice dragging off 80 people from a blind pig, and they’d had enough. This country is built on a powder-keg of plunder and greed, and the fuse burned down, that’s all. The people watched The Man’s TV and knew it was a lie—THEY didn’t live like that, and there was no way in hell the Man could make them believe his lies any more. Their frustration and desperation mounted until they couldn’t get no higher, they were invisible now, got no secrets to conceal. When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose. A white boy said that. And the stores came down.
As of this writing over 2000 people have been arrested and jailed, with bonds starting at $10,000 and going up. That means NO ONE gets out until trial. The jails are full—the City, the County, the House of Correction, those arraigned were taken to Jackson Prison to be held for trial, those who just came in were held in empty DSR buses until the jails had room for them. The system was breaking down. The President got up on TV with R. Strange MacNamara weeping over his shoulder and whined for “law and order.” Riots broke out in other cities all over the country. The television programs began to look stupider and less human than usual next to the reality news reports every hour. The reality news had stars and extras the folks back home had never been allowed to see. And these new stars were all “criminals,” thousands of them sit rotting in jail until they’re allowed their lawful “day in court.”
The people ruled the city for a minute and may still be ruling when this is printed. The hypocrisy of “democratic capitalism” stood exposed, naked and ugly. The troops protected the owners’ possessions and shot the people down in the streets for money. Sing it, shout it, scream it down—the news is out, people, you own the town.
—John Sinclair
Detroit, July 1967
(From The Fifth Estate #35, August 1-15, 1967)
Three years ago, in 2017, Detroit observed the 50th anniversary of the Uprising or Rebellion of July 23, 1967 with many stories in the local papers and a stunning series of artistic events staged in the city’s Cultural Center at the Wright Museum of African American History, the Detroit Institute of Arts, MOCAD, the Historical Museum and elsewhere in the area around Wayne State University.
The DIA concert was produced by Don Was as part of his annual Concert of Colors presentation of the best of Detroit music. Don invited me to perform there and commissioned me to write a piece in verse that would commemorate the Rebellion of 1967 and be performed with my band of eminent Detroiters. I based it on the song by John Lee Hooker called “Motor City Is Burning,” augmented ad recorded by the MC-5 on their first album.
Here is the poem I contributed to the commemoration of the Uprising of 1967:
MOTOR CITY IS BURNING
(Song by Al Smith-John Lee Hooker, additional lyrics by Rob Tyner)
You know the Motor City is burning, babyThere ain’t a thing in the whole wide world they can doI said the The Motor City is burning, babyThere ain’t a thing in god’s wide sky they can doMy home town was burning down to the groundWorser than Vietnam
It started at 5 o’clock that morning
of July 23, 1967,
on 12th & clairmount
on the near west side,
just down the street
from the chit chat lounge,
home of the funk brothers
& willie metcalf,
& not far from the club 12
once known as klein’s show bar
where yusef lateef & his men
held court for many years,
the rebellion started
at a private club
on the second floor of a building
at 9125 12th street,
up over economy printing,
called the united community league
for civic action
where people got together after hours,
they called them blind pigs
where people got together to drink & gamble
without a license, 4 o’clock in the morning
& there were 85 people in the joint
celebrating the homecoming
of two brothers from the neighborhood
from the war in Vietnam
& having so much fun
that the police bashed down the door
& arrested the offenders
& marched them down the steps
& loaded them into the police vans
down on 12th street
where people were walking home
from a night out, & witnessed the police
pushing their neighbors into the paddy wagons
& Bill Scott hollered: “Are we going to
let these peckerwood motherfuckers
come down here any time they want
& mess us around?” & the people shouted:
“Hell no!” & Bill Scott,
the son of the operator of the blind pig,
says he threw the first bottle at the police
& the shit was on!
It started on 12th & Clairmount that morningIt made the beat cops all jump & shoutYou know it started on 12th & Clairmount that morningIt made the pigs in the street freak outThe fire wagons they kept comingYeah, but the Black Panther snipers wouldn’t let’ em put it out
& word of the rebellion
spread up 12th street,
up linwood avenue, up dexter,
all the way to grand river,
and by sunday afternoon,
all over town, whole families
climbed through A&P windows
& picked the stores clean,
carting home the free groceries,
free furniture & color TVs,
guitars & leather coats,
shoes & clothes & liquor—
“get the big stuff!”
& when their energies turned
from smashing the stores
they would go for the police,
the dirty, rotten hated police
from the criminal 10th precinct
which would become famous
as the center
of a heroin distribution gang
operated by the police,
the Detroit police,
more than 4000 strong
of which 95% were white men
& the black officers totaled
less than 50—or as the NAACP put it
in 1965: “The Negroes in Detroit
feel they are part
of an occupied country. The Negroes
have no rights
which the police
have to respect. It would appear
that the average policeman
looks upon the Negro
as being a criminal type.”
but the police force
couldn’t contain the rebellion
& 8,000 Michigan Army National Guardsmen
almost 100% white men
from outstate michigan
were deployed
with their tanks
onto the streets of Detroit,
followed by 4,700 paratroopers
from both the 82nd
& 101st Airborne Divisions,
plus 360 Michigan State Police officers,
they placed the city under curfew
& started rounding up suspects
until more than 7200 citizens
had been taken off the streets
& stuffed into the jails,
held in the bathhouse at belle isle,
shipped to Jackson prison
80 miles away in buses
Fire bombs bursting all around me, babyYes & the soldiers were standing everywhereThe fire bombs were bursting all around me, baby’and the National Guard was everywhereI could hear my people screamingSi-reens filled the air
Four days of carnage,
arson & looting,
sunday, july 23
to thursday, july 27, 1967,
43 people killed,
1,189 injured,
more than 2,000 buildings destroyed
in the central city
but the damage
was carefully directed
at the objects of their oppression
as inhabitants of the ghetto,
and at the police & troops
who tormented them,
and most of the people who were killed
were gunned down by the police
like the brothers at the algiers motel,
the most fully documented
of all the police atrocities
committed during the rioting
although there was no rioting
at the algiers motel
except for the police terrorism
unleashed upon the victims—
this was a rebellion,
an uprising against racial oppression,
segregated housing,
the greedy landlords & businessmen
who controlled their environment,
the denial of economic opportunity,
the refusal to provide proper education
& the relentless persecution by the police—
no relief in sight,
nothing to look forward to,
no way to get ahead—
why not burn the motherfucker down?
—detroit
july 10-14 >
july 26-28, 2017 >
july 23, 2020
song lyrics by john lee hooker
& rob tyner
FREE THE WEED!
—Detroit
July 23, 2020
© 2020 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
