Detroit burns, 1967
Dear Friends,
Remember to mark calendars for the Rouge Forum Conference, Louisville, March 14, 15, 16, 2008.
The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil page is updated.
Of special interest is organizer Tom Suber’s critical report to the Rouge Forum from the UFPJ conference in Chicago.
We salute the school workers of Peru who, with their militant actions against anti-working class high-stakes exams, sparked a general strike that lasted 15 days, demonstrating the Rouge Forum thesis that education workers are centripetally positioned to initiate resistance, if not carry it through to peace with justice.
George and Sharon Schmidt, editors of Substance News from Chicago, the hard-copy media of the education resistance, offer a free three month subscription to Rouge Forum readers. You can email your request to Substance at Csubstance@aol.com. You may be asked to verify that you are on the Rouge Forum list (in order to ward off spammers, etc).
Two historical notes:
1. Today is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, a massive urban uprising, commonly posed today as a riot. While the rebellion was spontaneous, an insurrection, it was hardly a riot. A massive outpouring of armed resistance to racist exploitation and, especially, police repression fought the US military apparatus (including the 82 Airborne) for five days, finally meeting defeat. Surely, more than 43 died (working in Receiving Hospital as a volunteer, I lost count of the bodies). John Hershey’s “Algiers Motel Incident,” demonstrates the kind of brutality that typified the police. Following the uprising, thousands of jobs were opened to black people, transportation was offered (even to the suburbs), welfare rules eased; the carrot replaced the stick, for awhile. NPR has a review of the time at here.
And the Detroit News here.
Detroit today is a dying ghetto (lost 1.2 million residents, the mayor boasts of how many empty homes he can bulldoze each year, not one major grocery store in the city) being killed off by racism. Its schools, lynchpin of any possible recovery, teeter on the brink of complete collapse. The rebellion only speeded decay that had gone on for years. For a fine reprise of the city, see Mirel’s, Rise and Fall of an Urban School System. Detroit may well be the future.
2. Today is also the 35th anniversary of the passage of Title Nine, which opened school sports to women and altered the landscape of the US in innumerable ways.
With great sorrow, we recognize the death of Michigan’s Rabbi Sherwin Wine, humanist and early supporter of the Rouge Forum. His was a life lived with courage and meaning.
Watch for upcoming notices of the Rouge Forum San Diego Film series (suggestions for films happily accepted).
All the best,
r
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