April 4, 1968, my seventeenth birthday in my senior year of high school. Of the four thousand students in the school a bare handful were black. For kicks I had taken an elective class called Current Events, which was led by the first black teacher I ever had, Mr. Jackson, although that was over a year earlier when he taught early U.S. History for the eleventh grade. The way he taught history was pretty bad, but this class was fun. We basically sat around and discussed things going on in the news. We did have reading to do that provided us with a context on American foreign policy and the civil rights movement. Let me give you some more context: The previous summer was a time the media referred to as “the long hot summer.” Civil disturbances swept through cities like Tampa, Buffalo, DC, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Newark. Sunday, July twenty third, it came to Detroit. For the better part of a week Detroit was under martial law and a dusk to dawn curfew. The National Guard was activated with one of their staging grounds being Northwestern High School. I had played football on the field they camped out on.
On Friday a bunch of us guys jumped into a friend’s car and went down to check out the riot area. It was a bit surreal, driving through the streets of Detroit having National Guard deployed on the corners and seeing bullet holes in the windows of shops if the shops hadn’t been fire-bombed. Although I had ridden through it before I had never seen the inner city this close up. Apartment buildings came right up to the sidewalks, which were only about five feet wide and then the busy street. The thought came to me, “Where do the kids play?”
I worked part-time at a carpet store, and worked with a man that lived in the riot area. He told me how he couldn’t sleep at night for the tanks and halftracks coming down the street. He said one night a halftrack came down and opened fire with its fifty caliber machine gun across the top of an apartment building across the street.
On April 5, 1968 I was working at a Shell gas station back when someone pumped your gas for you – like me. At three in the afternoon a curfew was announced for Detroit and people began literally lining up for gas. We had three straight hours of eight pumps continuously going, because during the riots of the previous summer you could only get five gallons at a time. The police made us shut down by six thirty.
I was surprised by how well Mr. Jackson took Dr. King’s assassination. He didn’t seem that fazed for some reason. Two months later, my father called me from work before I went to school one morning to let me know Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated the night before. When Mr. Jackson came in that morning all he had to say was, “I don’t want to talk about it. I just don’t want to talk about it.”
That may have been when the hope for justice was turned back – the high point of liberalism. Since then the country has moved inexorably to the far right.
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