I’ve been invited on WJR-Detroit (NewsTalk 760 AM) on Monday morning, (11:10-11:30 a.m. Detroit time) to talk about the 1967 Detroit riot.

I covered the riot for The AP as a member of The AP Racial Task Force. The evening the Detroit riot started, I was on a plane from Chicago to a city I’d never visited in my life. I remember flying in around 11 p.m. and seeing the East Side in flames from above.

I got to the Detroit Bureau around midnight, was issued a rental car, went to my hotel and went to bed. The next morning at 8 a.m. I was driving down Twelfth Street on the East Side, epicenter of the riot. A bright sunny day. The Detroit police were (stupidly) still letting cars through single file. I’ll never forget my first look at stores along a street I’d never seen before, their glass fronts shattered and merchandise looted, the “Soul Brother” sign in some of them, debris and smoke everywhere. The sign didn’t do a lot of good.

After that, over three days or so, I was in just about every neighborhood the riot touched. Some things I remember:

– Getting shot at in the dark somewhere on the West Side.
– Being pinned down by gunfire beneath a fire truck along with the firemen, watching a frame house a block or so in front of us burn to the ground in about 20 minutes because the firemen were afraid to get out from under the truck.
– Returning to my rental car to find the rear window shattered.
– And most of all, little white me standing just off Taylor Street — unarmed but for a steno pad and a pen — surrounded by an angry crowd of black neighborhood residents on that first morning-after, listening as they aired their grievances and writing everything down madly.

Parking the car, getting out and just walking toward the corner of 12th and Taylor, with no idea of what I was doing or what would happen to me, was certainly one of the craziest, bravest things I’d ever done in my then-27-year-old life. It paid off in a Page One story. The fictionalized version of that encounter is in Chapter I of “A Sweet Guy -or- The Pulitzer,” working title of the novel-in-progress I’m now trying to finish. (Read the first few pages at www.frankjoseph.com.)

The Detroit riot never should have — never would have — occurred but for the idiotic behavior of the National Guard and police. When they heard gunfire, they responded by shooting out the streetlights. This plunged block upon block into darkness so that, next time shots were fired, they had no idea who was shooting. It might have been friendly fire — the cops in the next block, maybe — but they didn’t know, it was dark, they were untrained and unprepared, so they panicked and responded with gunfire of their own. I’m quite certain many of the 47 people who died in the Detroit riot were killed by stray National Guard and police bullets fired thusly.

What does this have to do with To Love Mercy? Directly, not much. Indirectly, quite a bit.

The riots of the mid ’60s helped drive me from the news business and, at age 27, go back to graduate school. Witnessing history, then having to write it in 350 words for the “A” wire, grew discouraging. And in addition, we at The AP had to write it down the middle, no analysis or interpretation. Yet I was seeing behavior on the streets I couldn’t capture in 350 words — things my white, middle-class, rational little brain could not make sense of. Chief among these was the “carnival factor,” which I saw over and over — blacks destroying their own neighborhoods, places there was so little to begin with. After three nights of Molotov cocktails and looting, there would be next to nothing.

Those people I talked to at 12th and Taylor gave me some of the answers. They were articulate about the lousy conditions in which they lived. But that still didn’t explain why many in the neighborhood — others, maybe, the “criminal element” maybe, but plenty of them just the same — were willing to destroy what little they had. And have the time of their lives doing it.

So I went back to graduate school at the University of Chicago, determined to get a Ph.D. in political sociology and spend the rest of my life exploring and answering these questions.

That turned out to be a bad decision. I discovered that no one in the U of C Political Science department had the least interest in my experiences on the street. Their attitude: If it didn’t happen in a book, it didn’t happen. I languished at the U of C for two dismal years, then moved to Washington and got back into the news business.

Now here I am, late in my life, still troubled by such questions, still convinced race is the single most important issue in America. It’s the issue no one wants to talk about — not us, certainly not our politicians — in an honest way. So it just sits there like the proverbial elephant in the living room, never going away. Elephant? What elephant?

That’s where I am. I long ago gave up on political sociology to help me answer such questions. Indeed, I despair of ever discovering answers in my lifetime. All that’s left are the questions. So I’m using the techniques of fiction to ask the questions as provocatively as I can.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. WJR-AM is a 50,000-watt station. On a good day, you can hear it in 38 states. And you can listen on the Internet at www.wjr.com. The information again: WJR (NewsTalk 760 AM), 11:10 EDT Monday July 31, the Frank Beckmann show.