"Wanted" Comes to Life in Detroit: The Black Insurrection of 1967 about to end by its own hand

We have forgotten what actually happened in Detroit in 1967

If you've ever seen the movie Wanted with Angelina Jolie, you need to check out the source material by Mark Millar. It's a graphic novel that bares little resemblance to its big screen spawn. The story centers around a war waged by all the world's super-villains - who joined together - against the few superheroes, and how this ingenious plan eventually overwhelmed the good guys. This "Fraternity" of villains took over the world - dividing the nations among themselves - and used advanced technology to erase every inhabitant of the earth's memory that the heroes or villains ever existed. 

Only faint, cloudy memories remain of the heroes who were trounced by evil.

The main character of the story, Wesley Gibson, is told of this by The Professor (who devised the plan of villains teaming up to defeat the heroes), and is incredulous as to how the real history of the world could be distorted:

Wesley: "I don't understand. How come this sin't in the history? Even there'd been one superhero, would that have been all over the news and stuff? 

The Professor: "Ah, but it wasn't enough just to beat them, Wesley. We had to strip them of their memories and make sure that even their greatest fans didn't remember them. 

"Such science might seem comical in this new world that we molded for you, but believe me when I say that reality itself can be rewritten if we desire it, boy." (Wanted, Millar, trade paperback, p. 47)

Reality itself can rewritten.

The story of Wanted is just a graphic novel. A comic book. But in our world, history can be rewritten. Actual events can be forgotten. No story verifies this fact more than what has happened in Detroit since 1967. We are on the verge of the state of Michigan assuming control of Black-run Detroit (82 percent now; roughly 35 percent Black at the time of the riots; less than 2 percent Black in 1912), a city

The law that threatens Detroit with direct state rule may be repealed through a petition drive powered by unions and residents opposed to white control of a city that’s 82 percent black. 

“It’s nothing but a takeover bill,” said Brandon Jessup, chairman of the Stand Up for Democracy coalition seeking 161,300 signatures to place the measure on the November ballot. “This is definitely a race issue. It’s affecting people of color not only in this generation but future generations.” 

Detroit needs to be run by Detroiters,” Mayor Dave Bing, a black Democrat, said last week at a press conference the day before Snyder called for the review. 

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson compared the city’s resistance to Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus, an act that began the Montgomery boycott in 1955 and a civil-rights watershed. 

Councilman Kwame Kenyatta said an emergency manager would be “a master, as someone to control the plantation,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

Forgotten is that Rosa Parks was once assaulted by a Black man in Detroit, long after her exploits in Montgomery made her a household name. This occurred in 1994 (when Detroit was more than 75 percent Black) and is a fitting reminder of the true legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. 


Black-Run Detroit has failed. Liberalism didn't fail the city; the Black leadership, elected from the electorate, failed. Black people left to their own devices when white people fled into the suburbs (and created thriving cities, some of the top school districts in the nation, and bustling economies) failed. 


The racial dynamics of Detroit - when it was considered the "Paris of the West" - was more than 70 percent white. In less than six years after Black people rioted in 1967, the city was majority Black and Coleman Young was the mayor. 


Just like in Wanted, we forget the battle that took place in Detroit in 1967. High rates of Black crime (in 1960, Black people were only 24 percent of the population of Detroit, but they accounted for 65 percent of the violent crime) were already forcing white people to flee to the suburbs. It was the Black insurrection - and the white capitulation that followed - that occurred in 1967 which has been completely forgotten about. 


Recently, I acquired the Life magazine from August 4, 1967. Just like the world of Wanted, what I read doesn't seem real in a nation governed by the principles of Black-Run America (BRA). The cover of this magazine shows the ominous outline of two National Guardsman - guns drawn - with a fire blazing in the background. With the main caption reading "Negro Revolt: The Flames Spread," this issue of Life seems like a glimpse into another world. 


One where the insanity of BRA was just bubbling to the surface, before its tentacles would ensnare every public and private institution in America. 


It is on p.19 of this issue that you can read the article "City at the blazing heart of a nation in disorder." It is these words that read like something out of the world of Wanted, where the villains won and the mere existence of heroes is but a shadowy memory:

With exploding heat and violence, the flames of Negro revolt crack led across the nation, bringing federal troops into riot duty for the first time in a quarter of a century. The disorder was country-wide, but at is blazing heart was Detroit, where the racial rioting ranked as the worst in U.S history. like Newark a few days earlier, the Detroit insurrection was touched off by a minor police incident - this time a raid on a Negro speakeasy. But it quickly flared into an even more destructive and persistent pattern of looting, arson and sniping. Whole city blocks went up in smoke, setting streets shimmering in waves of heat, and bullets whined and ricocheted unpredictably through the ruins. Unable to control the chaos with police and 8,000 national guardsmen, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Michigan Governor George Romney finally prevailed upon President Johnson to take the extraordinary step of supplying federal troops. Paratroopers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions - many of them veterans of Vietnam - rolled into the continuing fray. Not since 1943, and then, too in Detroit, had U.S. forced been so employed.  

Even so, death and destruction mounted. By midweek, at least 38 persons lay dead, including a policemen and a fireman. Looters and snipers died, as well as many innocent people caught in the often random cross-fire. 

This was the Negro Revolt of 1967, and event that helped bring about Black-rule in Detroit. Under Black rule - in the past year - we have seen what Life After White People looks like. With the city on the verge of being taken over by the state of Michigan, we can only ask how did it come to this? It's simple: the Negro Revolt that Life magazine spoke so openly about in 1967 has been forgotten, replaced with the progressive idea that Black people would be able to sustain a civilization - and city - they had no part in building, but had every part in destroying. 


A world where affirmative action destroyed the police, leaving the city in the hands of vigilantes in 2012. A city where the National Tuskegee Airmen Museum rests, a reminder of, something that really has nothing to do with Black people in 2012. Detroit is truly too Black for civilization, and Life magazine hinted at this back in 1967. It's the city where Freedom Failed, and where the game has already ended (sorry Clint Eastwood). 


But we can't even acknowledge any of the role Black people had in destroying Detroit, but must blame liberalism as the true culprit. Strange, liberalism flourishes in Pittsburgh, but that city survived the horrible decline of its steel industry. 


But Detroit can't survive its Blackness. It chokes on this Blackness, but because we live in a world where we can't acknowledge racial differences (because of that strange victory - like the one of the villains in Wanted - in 1967), the people of Detroit must drown in a sea of Black violence. Two stories from this past week illustrate the despondent reality of what Black-rule in Detroit means. One, the 43 murder of 2012, represents something truly sinister (Fight at Shower cited in slaying of 9-month-old baby, by George Hunter, Detroit News, February 25, 2012)

 A fight over a seat at a baby shower triggered the killing of a 9-month-old boy, according to the victim's grandmother. 

Delric Miller IV died Monday as he slept on the couch in his home on the 8400 block of Greenview Avenue. Police said someone fired at the house with an AK-47-type assault rifle about 4:30 a.m., leaving behind 37 shells. One of the rounds hit the baby, who was pronounced dead at Sinai-Grace Hospital. 

Delric Miller IV died Monday as he slept on the couch in his home on the 8400 block of Greenview Avenue. Police said someone fired at the house with an AK-47-type assault rifle about 4:30 a.m., leaving behind 37 shells. One of the rounds hit the baby, who was pronounced dead at Sinai-Grace Hospital. 

Delric's grandmother, Cynthia Wilkins, said she believes the shooting was retaliation for a skirmish Sunday at a baby shower at Club Celebrity on Plymouth Rd. in Detroit."The shower was overbooked, and there was an argument because there weren't enough seats," said Wilkins. Her daughter, Diamond Salter, attended the shower, which was thrown by a friend, Wilkins said. 

"A woman got mad because she couldn't find a seat, so she started knocking tables down, and it escalated from there," Wilkins said. "My daughter and her friends left the club, but (a group of men and women) followed them to a gas station, and there was a fight with one of the guys who was at the shower with my daughter. Then, they followed them to the house. 

"I think they came back the next day and shot up the house," said Wilkins, who sobbed as she recounted the events. "They went to the shower to celebrate life; instead, a life was destroyed." 

The shooting has outraged both police and residents, and prompted Detroit 300, a group of community activists fed up with crime, to go door-to-door asking questions, in hopes of finding the killer or killers. 

A task force consisting of the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives and the Wayne County Sheriff's Office is investigating the case."Life is not valued in Detroit. It's a war zone here," Wilkins said. "We need some ground troops patrolling these streets; they send them all overseas, but they need to be here." 

The death was the 43rd homicide in the city this year, up from 35 in the period last year. It's also the second killing of a youngster in Detroit in the past month."Again, adult behavior has brought another child in Detroit to an end," said Police Chief Ralph Godbee.

No, adult behavior didn't bring about the end of another child's life in Detroit. Black behavior did. Interesting that calls for ground troops to patrol the city of Detroit - just like New Orleans, where Black violence might bring about a call for ground troops as well - are needed in the last days of Black-rule, just like the beginning of Black-rule in those dark days of Negro Rebellion back in 1967.

Those days that we have forgotten about.

Life is balance. Never forget that. In the Alpha and Omega of Black-rule of Detroit, federal troops will occupy the city.

If not, more stories like the one of an 86-year-old Black guy being assaulted by a young Black punk will persist (With Video, Passers-by ignore injured car-jacked victim, 86, crawling at Detroit gas station, by Tammy Battaglia, Detroit Free Press, February 24, 2012):

The 86-year-old World War II Air Corps veteran, knocked to the ground during a carjacking on Detroit's west side, crawled across the gas station parking lot as people walked by. 

No one stopped to help, he says. Aaron Brantley, who worked for 31 years as a welder at a Chrysler plant in Hamtramck, recalled the ordeal Friday, two days after he was robbed outside the BP gas station on West McNichols at Fairfield, just east of the University of Detroit Mercy campus.Brantley estimates that at least four customers walked past him as he struggled for help, unable to walk because his leg was broken. "I never bothered anybody, and I always try to help somebody else when I could," he said Friday from home, his leg in a soft cast to his hip and not a tinge of bitterness in his voice. 

Brantley was on his way home from Bible study at Corinthians Baptist Church in Hamtramck, where he's a trustee, when someone hit him from behind and grabbed his keys at 10:40 a.m. Wednesday. The thief drove off in Brantley's 2010 Chrysler 200 -- bought to replace another car recently stolen."I noticed when I was crawling to the gas station, people were walking past by me like I wasn't there," he said. "I said, 'Lord, have mercy.' I said, 'Lord, some of them didn't even look around, just going to get their gas.' " 

Once Brantley got inside the gas station, the shocked attendant, Haissam Jaber, 37, and other customers called for help. 

"I've seen everything in here, but I couldn't believe it happened at 10 o'clock in the morning," said Jaber, who has worked at the station for 10 years. "And he actually pushed him down. It was a bad scene. He must be on drugs or something -- to push an old guy like this is sad. They do anything these days." 

It took so long for an ambulance to arrive, Brantley said, that he offered cash to a stranger to take him home. The Good Samaritan refused the money and drove him anyway. The ambulance met Brantley at home and transported him to Sinai-Grace Hospital. 

"I thought they ran over my leg," he said. "I didn't know what happened -- I didn't see him. When he had hit me and knocked me down on the ground, I went to get up and couldn't get up. So I crawled into that filling station there." 

A few hours after the carjacking, a man found Brantley's name and phone number in his Bible, still on the car's front seat, and called him. The car had been abandoned on the city's east side, the wheels and radio missing. 

Detroit police spokeswoman Sgt. Eren Stephens said no one has been arrested, and the case is under investigation. 

"Whenever a member of our community -- but especially a senior citizen -- becomes a victim of crime, it is very upsetting and disturbing," she said, requesting anyone with information to call police or Crime Stoppers.

This is the legacy of the Negro Revolt that Life magazine documented in 1967. White people fled Black crime - just as they do in every major metropolis in America - but because of the high concentration of Black people from the Great Migration (the most disastrous migratory movement in America, the complete reverse of Manifest Destiny), it quickly became the Black capital of America.

Now, with its school system perhaps the worst in the Western world (and already taken over by the state of Michigan); the lowest property value imaginable in America; and crumbling; the most unsafe streets in America, with violence and crime not even seen in war-torn areas; neglected buildings built by white people and burnt down by Black people during "Devil's Night" each year, Detroit is truly the best representation of what happens when Black people take control.

It is in that same Life issue from seemingly another world that an article, "On guard, specter of backlash" is printed on p. 24:

Of all the cities engulfed by negro violence, Detroit seemed one of the least likely candidates. Federal officials considered Detroit's anti-poverty program a model: up to last week it has poured more than $250 million into urban renewal and projects for the poor. Negroes had also attained a share of the political power. Detroit is the only city in the U.S. that has two Negro congressmen, and its young, progressive mayor, Jerry Cavanagh, had been popular with the Negroes. Unlike Newark and Watts, Detroit had no single ghetto (PK NOTE: no all of Detroit is a ghetto). 

But beneath the surface, the city simmered. Few of the statistics meant much to the Negroes who inhabited the eight-block area of 12th Street where the rioting erupted. The unemployment rate there was still 11%, and even higher among Negro youth. The area was the most densely populated in the city. Only 17% of the residents owned their own homes- compared with 60% in the entire city. A recent survey indicated that 91% feared being robbed and 93% wanted to move out. Even though economic conditions had improved, it served simply to raise Negro expectation - and the inevitable frustration when those hopes were not quickly satisfied. In the carnival-like revel of looting, Negroes took the luxuries they felt had been denied them - expensive liquor, color TV sets and hi-fi phonographs. "It looked like a singing commercial for all the things they had seen on television, says a Detroit sociologist.  

The rioting demonstrated the power of the discontented to disrupt and paralyze any city and the difficulty of reimposing law and order. It also raised the menacing prospect of white backlash. Whites already have started a run on gun shops and there was a danger that any community confronted by racial violence might be split into armed camps, white vs. Negro. If this occurs, an important lesson of the violence will be obscured. That lesson, says a Detroit psychologist, is "Learn, whitey, learn."

There was no white backlash. Whites left Detroit; Black people took over. Now, Detroit is one of the most unsafe cities in the world, because of the Black population present there.

We saw violence explode across the nation - Black violence - in the summer of 2011. The lessons that should be learned come directly from the Negro Revolt that Life magazine discussed openly in its August 4th, 1967 issue.

Just like in Wanted, the bad guys have won and remade the world in their image. We have forgotten the lessons of the past, and for this reason, we can't confront the reason that life is held in such low esteem in Detroit.

We can't even remember what the past looked like, because the world of BRA has clouded it in a shroud of white racism, bigotry, discrimination, and ultimately, white supremacy.

Looking at what happened in Detroit in the summer of 1967, there's a reason all of those things existed.

Detroit's collapse is near. The city is forced to sell of assets to make payroll. We must remember that it was a Negro Revolt - as Life told us - that made this all possible.

It wasn't white privilege that killed the 9-month-old in Detroit; it wasn't white privilege that refused to help an 86-year-old carjacked Black man in Detroit; it was a city where Black privilege has reached its startling conclusion. It's a city where an "Africa Town" was almost mandated by tax dollars, because of the shocking lack of Black entrepreneurship in a city where Black people are 82 percent of the population.

It's a city that we must understand is a reminder of what happens when Black people are left to their own devices.

The legacy of the Black insurrection of 1967 is seen in the tragic end of the nine-month-old; it's seen in the indifference to an 86-year-old Black veteran being ignored as he crawled for help after being car-jacked.

If we can't remember this, there is no use trying to save America.