The Burning of Murder City USA

By Michael C. Hughes

In 1920, Detroit was a bustling city of almost a million people. It was also the most technologically advanced and fastest growing city on the entire planet at the time. All thanks to the auto assembly line that was invented there and had been booming since Henry Ford rolled out the first Model T in 1908. A city with the brightest of futures.

By 1950, Detroit was known as Motor City, and was one the main engines driving American prosperity. The population had swelled to two million and Detroit still had the brightest future in America. But problems were already setting in. Unemployed blacks fleeing poverty of the Deep South were arriving in numbers so large even the automakers couldn’t provide jobs for everyone. Migration into the city was proving to be a slow-burning fuse. GIs ―both black and white―who had returned from WWII did not want to fight again for jobs on the lines. Nor did other blacks already living in the city lucky enough to have jobs with the Big Three: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. Many new arrivals faced limited job prospects and simply gave up and went on the welfare rolls to survive.

By the 1960s, Detroit had become even better known as Motown, one of the new music capitals of the world. But it was also slipping into a place of Darwinian struggle—survival of the fittest and the most desperate: too many still fighting for jobs available. But by the mid ‘60s bitterness and racial tensions had set in. Not just tensions between blacks and the almost all-white police force, but just as much between blacks and blacks. Downtown Detroit began to empty of white people entirely as they fled by the thousands to the suburbs and small towns outside the city, which left blacks to war with each other for very limited downtown turf. The city core was spinning out of control and Detroit was eventually overtaken by a mindless kind of violence. Attacks for no reason: violence for the sake of striking out at someone. Anyone. No one was safe downtown any more.

But by 1967 the city had earned an entirely new name: the sickening epithet Murder City USA. The highest murder rate in America for many years in a row by then. The people who lived there, feeling trapped and with no way out, could see and feel the city unraveling. They knew they were living in a powder keg.
Then, in the small hours of a searing Saturday night in July of that year, it blew. For four days Detroit was filled with gunfire and looting as the city burned. More a Vietnam battle zone than a once-great American city. When it was over, forty-three were dead, many hundreds were injured, and more than fourteen hundred homes, buildings, and businesses were burned and leveled. Much of the area around 12th Street was a burned-out smoldering ruins. An area many blacks called Blackbottom, the heart and soul of old black Detroit, died in those four days.

One of those who lived there and saw it all coming in person was my good friend Spider Jones. He saw, as a boy growing up, all the signs of a city primed to blow. And he was there that fateful night when the first bottle smashed against the wall at 2:00 a.m. and he got sprayed by glass shards as rioting took hold all around him. They swept through downtown with a life of their own, moving as fast as the flames. Spider got out alive—barely. This is Spider’s story. And Detroit's. An I-was-there first-hand chronicle of the years leading up to the riots of 1967 and four nights and days in the firestorm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael C. Hughes
• Release date: Apr 14, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370402274

Michael C. Hughes

Raised in Battle Creek, Michigan, Michael had a successful career as a journalist and news editor before launching his own marketing/PR firm. Det. Ty Connell is a hybrid character based on police officers Michael has known well at city, state, and federal levels. He also counts as a reliable source a formerly active member of one of New York City's major crime families since retired from "the Life." In addition to the Ty Connell Series, Michael has written biographies of two colorful sports/media personalities, as well as a chronicle of events leading up to what were called "the Detroit Race Riots of 1967." That book, THE BURNING OF MURDER CITY USA, was a nominee for the 2018 Michigan Notable Book of the year. It is also available in eBook and paperback.

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Copyrighted, Registered Material.

This is a true story. While events and characters are based in on real events, some names, characters, places, and incidents may have been altered for copyright reasons. This book is based on the previously published biography, OUT OF THE DARKNESS, THE SPIDER JONES STORY, by Michael Hughes and Spider Jones. © 2003. All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the author constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If You would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at [e-mail]

© First edition: June 2016 Michael Hughes

 Writers Guild of America 2016 Michael Hughes

THE BURNING OF

MURDER CITY USA

Michael Hughes and Spider Jones

The night old Detroit died…

"Wild Rumors began flying around like crazed bats, coming at you from every direction, and I saw that the city I loved was coming apart. Someone said the Fox Theater had just been bombed. Someone else said that heavily-armored Abrams tanks tanks were out on the highways, wild–eyed young marine boys gathering to come in. Someone else said choppers were coming, gunships with heavy machine guns just back from Vietnam. Someone else said three black teens had been shot by police at the Algiers Motel. That snipers were taking over the rooftops. That the police were shooting at shadows.

Wild talk, and who knew what was true?

A bottle smashed against the brick wall beside us, spraying us with glass shards. Rose screamed and put her arm to her face, to cover it. Then an explosion from a hand-thrown bomb blew out the storefront in front of us, plate glass blown onto the street. We watched, stunned, as flames surrounded us and the stench of black smoke began to fill the air. Then there was another glow from another part of the sky. Then another. And another. The rising wail of sirens now coming from every direction: fire engines, ambulances, police cars. All of a sudden people began looting, dodging flames and broken glass to run into bombed out stores and grab whatever they could get. One lady in hair curlers was walking down the center of the street with a shopping cart full of goods like she was out Sunday shopping. Insanity took over.

Rosemary gripped Charlie's arm and said, Lord, what's happening? In so few minutes it was a kind of hell zone. We had to get out of there. First we had to make it to the car, and we headed that way, but the riot seemed to take on a life of its own and we were trapped, caught like in a grass fire fanned by the wind. It made an almost inhuman howl."

- Spider Jones

Preface

What took old Detroit from the fastest growing city in America to a veritable ghost town in four terrible nights and days? It took many years on slow simmer until it all blew.

This is one man’s chronicle of the years leading up to those four days that would change America’s urban landscape forever.

In 1920, Detroit was a bustling city of almost a million people. Also the most technologically advanced and fastest growing city on the entire planet at the time. All thanks to the auto assembly line that had been invented there and had made the city a boom town ever since Henry Ford rolled out that first Model T in 1908.

A city with the brightest of futures everyone agreed.

By 1950, Detroit was known as Motor City, and was one of the main engines driving American prosperity, the population had swelled to two million and Detroit still had the brightest future in America. But problems were already setting in. Unemployed blacks who began fleeing poverty of the Deep South in the thirties were arriving in larger and larger numbers through the forties and fifties. Even the success of the auto-making sector and all the spin-off industries that it created around Greater Detroit couldn’t provide enough jobs for everyone arriving. Migration into the city was a slow-burning fuse. GIs ―both black and white―who had returned from WWII did not want to fight again for jobs on the lines. Nor did other blacks or whites already living in the city and lucky enough already to have jobs with the Big Three: Ford, GM, and Chrysler. So many new arrivals faced limited job prospects and simply gave up and went on the welfare rolls and on the hustle to survive.

By the early 1960s, Motor City had become known as Motown, rising quickly as one of the new music capitals of the world. But the city was also slipping into a place of Darwinian struggle—survival of the fittest and the most desperate: too many still fighting for too few jobs available.

But by the mid ‘60s bitterness and racial tensions had set in. Not just tensions between blacks and the still almost all-white police force, but just as much between blacks and blacks. Downtown Detroit began to empty of white people entirely as they fled by the thousands to the suburbs and the small towns outside the city, which left blacks to war with each other for very a very small patch of downtown turf that some blacks liked to refer to as Blackbottom. The original Blackbottom of Detroit City was located in the north end, a couple of miles north of the downtown Twelfth Street area, and actually referred to the black loam soil of the area. In any event, however you called it, the city core was spinning out of control and Detroit was eventually overtaken by a mindless kind of violence never before seen in America. Daily attacks seemingly for no reason. Violence for the sake of striking out at someone. Anyone. I came to be that no one was safe downtown any more.

By 1967 the city had earned an entirely new and sickening epithet: Murder City USA. The highest murder rate in America for many years in a row by then. A once great city with a once shining future turned into a disheartening soul-crushing urban hellscape. The people who lived there, feeling trapped and with no way out, could see and feel the city unraveling and that it had caused ordinary peaceful people to turn on each other. Black people of downtown Detroit knew they were living in a powder keg.

Then, in the small hours of a searing Saturday night in July of that year, it blew.

For four days Detroit was filled with gunfire and looting as the city burned. More a Vietnam battle zone than a once-great American inner city.

When it was over, forty-three were dead, many hundreds were injured, and more than fourteen hundred homes, buildings, and businesses were burned and leveled. Much of the area around 12th Street, Blackbottom, was a burned-out smoldering ruins. The heart and soul of old black Detroit died in those four days.

Many had seen the trouble coming. Had lived with it with a growing sense of anxiety, unease, and dread as they saw where their city was headed. Saw the fuse burning. One of those who grew up there and saw it coming was my good friend Spider Jones. He saw, as a boy growing up in and around the city, all the signs of a city primed to blow. And he was there that fateful night when the bottle smashed against the wall at 2:00 a.m. and he got sprayed by glass shards as first echoes of rioting took hold all around him. The rioting then seemed to sweep through downtown with a life of its own, moving as fast as the flames.

Spider got out alive—barely.

All these years later, Detroit has never recovered from what is now called The 12th Street Race Riots, or, The Rebellion of ’67, or several other labels. Any way you call it, it was the worst civil unrest in U.S. history. And Detroit went from being America’s fourth largest city and a powerhouse on the rise, to falling off the charts and barely making it onto the list of the top twenty American urban areas today. And it’s still falling.

What led to events that could set one of America’s most prized cities back almost a hundred years? How did Detroit fall so far out of the mainstream of American life that no one wanted to know about it or cared to do anything?

Many things caused that. Poverty and horrific living conditions to be sure. But probably what caused it in a single word: governance. Bad governance. Neglect at all levels: municipal, state, and federal.

Some facts:

The Exodus-like migration of black people from the 1940’s through the 1950s was like that of an entire nation of desperate and poor people ―more than four hundred thousand in over just ten years― moving from the South into downtown Detroit. Most into a ghetto area of only a few hundred square acres, smaller than Central Park.

In the Sixties, as Detroit was going from being known as Motor City, to Motown, to Murder City, ninety per cent of murders were black-on-black. A city turning in on itself.

Something insidious had set in. Driving this state of desperation was the fact that downtown Detroit black people had become the Great Dispossessed. People with nothing. In the Blackbottom and 12th Street area of black downtown Detroit, there were almost no black owners of houses, apartments, stores, or businesses. Downtown Detroit was virtually one hundred per cent owned by absentee landlords, virtually all white, and most from many from miles away, even from other states and cities: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York. Owners didn’t see or care about the day-to-day carnage: they just wanted their rents.

According to my friend Spider, black people came to hate themselves for having got into the position of having nothing and having little chance of ever getting anything. They hated that they had been driven into rat-infested corners to live with the rats. They hated that they had allowed themselves to be driven to live that way. And two things happened: rage and desperation skyrocketed as self-esteem plummeted and self-loathing took hold. Then, when the match was lit, the great dispossessed of Detroit turned on themselves.

Spider Jones was there and saw it all happen. He also felt the undermining grind of low self-esteem but through it all he, personally, never lost sight of his own dreams. But he will tell you today that low self-esteem and depression undercut everybody and everything around him as he grew up and continued to plague him for much of his life. He finally beat what he calls those two demons, depression and low self-esteem, and managed to achieve his dreams, to be a singer, a successful radio personality, and a busy motivational speaker doing his best to help young people.

But he went through a hell he calls Dee-troit to get there.

This is Spider’s story, and a chronicle of the years leading up to the riots of ’67 and four nights and days in the firestorm.

- Michael Hughes

Foreword

I was there the night my city died. Blackbottom was the heart and sould of Old Detroit!

For most of my life success was a goal that hurt to think about. Hurt so much I wouldn't let myself dream the dream. But dreams die hard when they're good ones, and my dream kept at me my entire life.

I grew up poor with the skyline of downtown Detroit casting a dark shadow over my entire life, and of all those around me as well. Satisfaction was an elusive thing, always undermined by the damn beasts that stalked me my whole life—lack of self-confidence and lack of self-esteem. Again, it wasn’t just me. My whole block—hell, the whole damn black part of the city—was beaten down by them prowling beasts. Low self-esteem was an epidemic. Like a virus that went around. Made us turn on ourselves and on each other.

I eventually beat those demons but, still, even now, I can sometimes see them lurking when I look in the mirror, defeated but never entirely gone. I search my eyes and I see what others don’t see. Lingering old doubts trying to shake me up, gnaw away at my confidence like the big fat sewer rats of my boyhood. It makes me feel sometimes that I’m living an illusion. Sometimes I don’t fully believe that I’m actually alive and free and that I actually made it out from under the negativity, suspicion, and self-doubt that poverty and racism pounded into us.

One thing that people don’t realize about poverty is that it cuts you off from everything. From hopes and dreams. From just believing you’ll ever achieve a peaceful and contented life. One of the worst things poverty does is make you live poor. That might sound so obvious it’s not worth saying, but what I man is never having anything worth having. You become an entire community of dispossessed. You own nothing, or practically nothing, and what you do is all beaten down and old. You live like a kind of a alien in your own city and country. You’re cut off and left out.

This story is about how I grew up and how I had to watch day by day and year by year as things got worse and worse for my people until they finally exploded. And when they did, they burned down their own neighborhoods. Why? But nobody owned any part of it. Hardly any black people were stakeholders in their own destinies, owning their own lives. We were rent-payers and low job seekers. There was no hope to build anything, so people just burned it all down. Warn’t theirs. Burn it down. Start fresh somewhere new. A lot of us did.

- Spider Jones

The Burning of

Murder City USA

Chapter One

Murder City Burns

Too many storm clouds had been gathering over the city for too long. Clouds of racial unrest. The murder rate had skyrocketed to over 700 that year, a record. Motor City became Murder City USA. A sickening title, especially since buried in that notorious claim was the fact that by far most of the crime was black on black and most of the victims were also black. My people.

12th Street and downtown were primed to blow.

Like the calm before a terrible storm, there was an odd edgy stillness to the city that night of Saturday, July 23, 1967. Also a strange greenish glow in the early evening sky overhead, like before a twister hits. But so much anger in the streets. So intense you could feel it like heat from a fire-pit. Simmering, simmering, just waiting to explode. The temperatures had also been high, in the high nineties for weeks, sweltering, thick with humidity, setting records and straining everyone to the break point. There were no arenas, or wading pools, or such things as cooling centers in those days. As far as the city, the state, and the federal governments were concerned, if you were black and trapped downtown, you sat in your airless little concrete oven of an apartment and you died slowly. And hundreds did.

That evening began quietly enough, the people beaten down by the heat. I was with Rose and Charlie, and we were cruising down 12th Street in Charlie's sleek new '66 Chrysler New Yorker. One of those big showboat cars of the '60s with the massive chrome bumpers and grille and just as massive dashboards with all the fancy knobs and dials. Charlie was showing he’d made it on the Big Three assembly lines and we got lots of hoots and hollers! Go, brother, go!

Also with us were my older sis, Barbara, and my main man, TC. The radio was tuned to Detroit's top soul station, WCHB, and we were headed, as we always did on Saturday nights, to the maze of black-owned and operated shops, restaurants and nightclubs downtown. Between ourselves, we always called that area Blackbottom. We knew that the real Blackbottom was outside the city to the north, settlers’ farm land with something to do with rich black loamy soil. But this was our Blackbottom – downtown Big D!

And the whole area had a kind of electric funky bluesy Harlem-west feel to it. The place to go to party on weekends. After the bars closed, we headed uptown to an after-hours joint in the north end, the TULC Club. These clubs were known as blind pigs—like a Roaring Twenties speakeasy. Some had music and food but, most of all, they sold bootleg booze, beer, and drugs under the table after everywhere else had closed down. And they were always noisy and full of life. The cat who ran the TULC was a real rounder and gambler friend, our old friend Sampson.

We had some brew, had some smoke, had a bit to eat, and left about 2:30 a.m. to head back downtown, to another blind pig we knew, when Barb noticed a red glow in the night sky. It was coming from downtown.

Something's burning up! she said and we all heard the anxiety in her voice.

Something sure as hell was burning!

I'd never seen so much smoke. There had been major rioting by blacks in the Watts area of south L.A., and some in Harlem two summers before. Then just a few weeks earlier, there had been bad rioting in Newark. When, we had all wondered, was Detroit in for it?

Even though we were braced for something to blow, that night we just thought that it must have been a big building that had caught fire. We went to see what it was and, as we drew closer, we could hear the wail of fire sirens converging on the area, then a dozen police cruisers screamed past us.

We turned onto 12th Street and headed south towards Clairmount, but we could only make it a block because police had 12th Street barricaded. We decided to park and walk to the blind pig, figuring we'd have a look at the source of the smoke later.

Usually, the pig we entered was a raucous after-hours hot spot. But on this night the mood was anything but festive.

It was sullen and ugly.

Rumors and stories were circulating. About how white cops had thrown down a couple of young brothers the night before. The attack had been done by The Big Four, a term of derision that black folks had pinned on Detroit's much-feared and ludicrously-named Morality Squad. Big, ex-military, and hard-as-nails white guys. But there wasn't much moral about those dudes. They were on a mission: to pound on any black that crossed them

They used their badges as an excuse to beat on blacks at will. This latest was just another of the endless attacks of cold-blooded brutality they served up on Detroit's black kids. Stories of atrocities of blacks at the hands of rogue white cops had been circulating for so long you almost became deadened to them. Stories would surface, people would mutter, the stories would fade, and the anger would diffuse.

But this night something was different.

This night people were listening, the mutters were threats of vengeance. And the anger wasn't diffusing, it was spreading.

A day earlier, The Big Four had reportedly pulled two black kids over simply because they had been cruising downtown in a big shiny new Cadillac. The cops had no idea the car belonged to the kids' father, a successful dentist: to them any brother driving an expensive machine was a