Ford was willing to put up with some harmless rhetoric. Men like Henry Ford II, for example, quickly took the measure of most of the black radicals and decided they could serve as a political buffer inside the ghettos in return for prestige and a healthy grant from New Detroit’s coffers. From the beginning, the more far-sighted of New Detroit’s corporate elite saw the need to enlist the services of radical-sounding advocates of black power and community control, in addition to their tried and true agents in the trade union bureaucracy and the traditional middle-class black leaders. Henry Ford II bankrolled the New Detroit Committee with a $2 million grant, for starters, from the Ford Foundation. More blacks had to be integrated into the force and trained to serve as uniformed gunmen for the ruling class.Īt the same time, the corporate rulers had to acknowledge the existence of racism, demonstrate their “concern,” and actually make some improvement in the conditions of life in the ghettos. The police force could no longer maintain law and order as an open and virtually lily white occupation force in the ghettos. Some of the spoils of exploitation had to be shared with “responsible” blacks, who would help keep down the working class masses. They had to find black middle-class elements whom they could trust to defend their interests. The red-neck police chiefs of the past and virtually all-white political establishment had to be changed. The rebellion had proven that they could not continue to defend their property and profits without making changes in the political apparatus. Billed as the “new urban coalition,” a meeting of minds of the rich and powerful, the representatives of labor and the black community, it was a high-powered and at the same time desperate maneuver by the capitalist rulers. This meeting established itself as the New Detroit Committee (NDC), later to become New Detroit Incorporated. Detroit Edison Chairman Walker Cisler financier and industrialist Max Fisher Ralph McElvenny, president of Michigan Consolidated Gas William Day, president of Michigan Bell Telephone and department store owner Stanley Winkelman. Roche Henry Ford II Chrysler Chairman Lynn Townsend department store magnate Joseph Hudson Jr. The list of corporate chiefs at the meeting reads like a “who’s who” in the ruling circles of Detroit: General Motors President James M. There was even a black nationalist radical, a young man by the name of Norvel Harrington. On the same day, in Detroit’s City-County Building, Governor George Romney and Mayor Jerome Cavanagh headed up an extraordinary meeting of 39 people, including virtually every top corporate executive in the city.Īlso present were United Auto Workers (UAW) President Walter Reuther Jack Wood, Detroit & Wayne County Building Trades Council secretary-treasurer state and local Republican and Democratic officials and black city officials, churchmen and administrators, including Arthur Johnson, Detroit Public Schools deputy superintendent and Damon Keith, Michigan Civil Rights co-chairman. On July 27 in Washington, President Lyndon Johnson announced the formation of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, headed by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner. But even before the troops were removed, the ruling class, shaken and frightened by the spread of urban rebellion, began a conscious effort to revamp its political machinery for duping the masses with democratic illusions and, when necessary, stamping out their resistance by force. curfew was to remain in effect until the following Tuesday, the day that the federal troops would be withdrawn from the city streets. Forty-three Detroiters lay dead and 1,189 injured, most of them blacks. Thousands of Detroiters remained penned up in jails and makeshift detention centers, under inhuman conditions. A thousand families were sleeping on the sidewalk, burnt out of their homes. Parts of the city’s black ghettos were still smoking and entire blocks of houses were in rubble. The revolt of the most oppressed and poverty-stricken sections of the working class had been put down by the occupation force of army troops, National Guardsmen, state and city police. Part one was published on July 21, part two on July 22.īy Thursday, July 27, 1967, the worst of the rioting in the streets of Detroit was over. This is the third and final part of “Twenty years since the Detroit rebellion, ” originally published in 1987.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |