Speaker 1: Massacre Monday. The city Detroit, Michigan. The year nineteen hundred
Speaker 1: and forty three, nineteen hundred and sixty seven. I didn't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe I didn't know. No, I didn't know. Maybe I
Speaker 1: didn't know. I didn't know I did. The Detroit riots
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty three were one of five that summer.
Speaker 1: It followed the ones in New York City, La Beaumont, Texas,
Speaker 1: and Mobile, Alabama. The first Detroit massacre took place June twentieth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty three. It was some youngins out at Beilile Park.
Speaker 1: They got to fight some sailors, and that joint trickled
Speaker 1: all the way into the city to the point where
Speaker 1: white folks was in front of the Roxy Theater, catching
Speaker 1: black folks getting off the trolley to go to work
Speaker 1: and beating them and killing them in the streets. They
Speaker 1: flipped over twenty cars of black families. It was chaos
Speaker 1: for three days June twentieth June twenty second. It only
Speaker 1: shut down when six thousand federal troops pulled up. They
Speaker 1: had to restore peace in the city set curfus. Thirty
Speaker 1: four people were killed that weekend, twenty five of them
Speaker 1: were black. Most of them at the hands of the
Speaker 1: white police officers. Four hundred and thirty three people got hurt,
Speaker 1: seventy five percent of them black. Two million dollars worth
Speaker 1: of property damage that weekend, the equivalent of thirty million
Speaker 1: dollars today. There with nineteen forty three, y'all were not
Speaker 1: to be outdone by the nineteen sixty seven Detroit riot.
Speaker 1: This one happened in the early mornings of Sunday, July
Speaker 1: twenty third, nineteen sixty seven. By the end of this
Speaker 1: one that have been forty three people dead, one thousand,
Speaker 1: one hundred and eighty nine people were injured, over seventy
Speaker 1: two hundred arrest and over four hundred buildings were destroyed.
Speaker 1: Another one of those situations of the Great Migration. Black
Speaker 1: folks leaving that Jim Crow South, trying to better their lives,
Speaker 1: move into Detroit, not even realizing that the kkk OH
Speaker 1: they posted up in Michigan as well. In nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: twenty three percent of the police force in Detroit was white,
Speaker 1: even though thirty percent of the city's residents we're black.
Speaker 1: So again, early morning, Sunday, July twenty third, nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 1: the cops run up in the Blond Pig. They just
Speaker 1: expected it to be a couple of people there for
Speaker 1: the after hours. But now the Blond Pig were jumping.
Speaker 1: They were celebrating the gi have returned from the Vietnam War.
Speaker 1: So the police said they wanted to arrest everybody in there,
Speaker 1: so they waiting for transportation to get there so they
Speaker 1: can rest all eighty two of these black folk. Of course,
Speaker 1: it draws a crowd, and the owner of the Blond
Speaker 1: Pigs set it off. He threw a bottle of the
Speaker 1: police officer. After that, the folks start looting the stores.
Speaker 1: The Michigan State Sheriff's Department, the National Guard have to
Speaker 1: pull up. But it's Sunday, so it took a little
Speaker 1: while to get sufficient manpower. And in that little while
Speaker 1: black folk would wreaking habit and see the Detroit police.
Speaker 1: They very inaccurately assumed that the rioting and the looting
Speaker 1: would just eventually stop, but it didn't. They didn't make
Speaker 1: their first arrest until seven am, which was three hours
Speaker 1: after the raid on the Blond Pig. What alarming to
Speaker 1: anyone else to some of the same gripes and complaints
Speaker 1: that black folk have in twenty twenty four, the way
Speaker 1: we're treated in retail stores in comparison to our white counterparts,
Speaker 1: underfunding for the schools for our babies, the discrimination in
Speaker 1: housing for black folks, employment opportunities are lack thereof, and
Speaker 1: the high unemployment rate for black folks, the communication issues
Speaker 1: we have with the police officers in our communities that
Speaker 1: aren't a direct reflection of the constituents in the community
Speaker 1: that they serve, and just the blatant racism. Those same
Speaker 1: exact gripes and complaints are what started the race riots
Speaker 1: in Detroit in nineteen hundred and forty three and nineteen
Speaker 1: hundred and sixty seven. And I didn't know. Maybe you
Speaker 1: didn't either. No,