Progress?

40 years ago this upcoming Monday, the 12th Street riot erupted in Detroit. Entire city blocks burned and the whole country watched as they had with Watts just two years earlier and would see in Chicago and DC the next summer. It amazes me that these things happened in our country this recently. While prejudice is not totally absent from my generation, the events that sparked the riots are almost unthinkable today.

Perhaps more amazing to me than the mere happening of the riots is that a lot of things haven't changed in Detroit. People don't go downtown to shop or do anything really; many of the burned buildings were just left for dead. When the national media comments on fires in Detroit on Devil's Night, it's largely these buildings that are getting burned. And yes, there are that many that these arsons can occur every single year seemingly without end.

When I visit Detroit now, it's as a tourist. I'm no longer a resident of Michigan, and as such, I can make more decisions about where to go when I'm there. I'm also much more impressionable. When I was a freshman in college, my grandparents and I went to the North American International Auto Show one night during my winter break. As anyone who knows anything about cars knows, this is the big one. It's a huge auto show. Cobo Hall is packed with people. Literally. And there was a shooting in the foyer outside the convention floor on a weeknight at 9pm. You can't have stuff like that happening during your biggest tourism week of the year. Yet Detroit does.

This article from US News and World Report compares the progress made by Newark, NJ and Detroit, the two cities hit hardest in 1967. This is the article that inspired this post today. While it's done in typical USNWR style (about six vague sentences and some nice graphics all bundled tidily into a two page feature), it did inspire me to find out more about these events. What I knew already was that for people from the Detroit area, particularly the suburbs, the riots were this unbelievable, terrifying part of life in other places that was happening right in front of their faces. For many people, time is still measured relative to these. My grandfather refers to pretty much all events of the 1960s and 70s as being before or after "the riots." And everyone knows exactly what he's talking about.

I wrote at the beginning of the post that I was amazed that these things even happened during my parents' lifetimes. But as I thought more about it, it's amazing to me how many people in Detroit live as if they're in a third world country in 2007. There are, depending on who you talk to, anywhere between 30 and 50 percent of Detroit's residents below the poverty line. Nearly half of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate. This means they can sign their names, maybe read a street sign or a bus schedule, but that's about it. Only about half of Detroit residents have any sort of insurance, either private or Medicaid/Medicare. Nationally, nearly 85 percent of Americans are covered in some way. Unemployment in the city is nearly 15 percent. Again, nationally, unemployment is less than 5 percent.

So Detroit has never really recovered. And it's not likely to anytime soon. The 40th anniversary of the riots are really an excellent time for the city to look back at where it's been and where it could go. As links pop up over the next few weeks looking back, I'll be sure to put them up. I hope some good comes from this dubious anniversary.