Against the Tides: Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs

The years 1967 and 1968 were turbulent times in my home city of Detroit, Michigan. In the summer of 1967 on July 23, two days before my 17th birthday, the Detroit riot began. It was also known as the 12th street riot. I remember it vividly. I was sitting in the living room on the couch in my grandmother’s two-story home on Boston Boulevard and 12th street on the Westside of Detroit. I happened to be reading a Muhammad speaks newspaper, the newspaper put out by the Black Muslims, led by Elijah Muhammad at the time. It was maybe 3:00 in the morning when my 16 year-old brother came through the door and said to me “man there is a riot on 12th street’’ “I was there when it started” “The police raided an after-hours joint but this brother with a green shirt (later to be named “Green Sleeves”) climbed on top of a car and shouted are you going to let them take our people to jail, then all hell broke loose.” That was the beginning of the infamous 12th street riot which lasted 5 days. The Detroit police could not stop it. It took the National Guard to end it on the fifth day. I remember it being very hot during those days with temperatures in the 90s with high humidity. On April 4th 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee and his death sparked another riot in Detroit and in other cities. These were indeed turbulent times. A time in which Detroit went from being the automobile capital of the world and the center of the Motown record empire started by Barry Gordy to being the drug and murder capital in just a few short years. This is the backdrop for my story, a ravaged city which would never recover even until today. The winter of 1968 was as bitterly cold as any I remember. I was a lost soul and had fallen prey to the mean streets of Detroit. I was smoking weed, snorting heroin, and dropping any kind of pill I could get my hands on. I was a true mess. I was robbing and stealing and running around with the wrong crowd but the right crowd for me at the time or so I thought. That winter I began to experience severe migraine headaches, one of which lasted nonstop for two weeks. All of this occurred while I was living with my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, and siblings on Boston Boulevard on Detroit’s west side although some of my time was spent on Beals street and Charlevoix on the east side of Detroit where my mother lived with a friend. My mother’s friend had three children, so with my three brothers, two sisters, and niece there was a full house. My favorite part of that house was the basement in which there was a pool table and an old jukebox, the kind with 45 rpm records. A few times on the weekend my brother and I would convert the pool table into a crap table and have gambling parties. For a period of six months, I went back and forth from the east side of Detroit to the west side. I remember feeling very tired and worn out by the life I was living. I had no hope for a better future. The way I was living, I thought I would either die on the streets or end up in jail. One spring evening at the house on Beals street I felt the need to be alone so I went down to the basement and sat in a chair. The room was in semi-darkness and I sat there and thought over my life. I thought about how at age 7, I along with my mother and father, my four brothers, and my sister moved into the Brewster projects on the east side of Detroit near the downtown area. I thought of my father dying of leukemia less than a year after we moved to the Brewster projects, leaving my mother with six children to raise alone. I thought about my grandfather dying not long after. I thought about one of my younger brothers who when getting too close to the stove being badly burned when his shirt caught on fire. I thought about how on Christmas Eve of 1962 our project home burned up forcing us to move in with our grandmother and I thought about how the same brother that was burned in the fire was run over by a truck and killed in 1964.