Black Detroit by Herb Boyd

Author:Herb Boyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-20T04:00:00+00:00

20

UNDER DURESS FROM STRESS

As the sun was setting in 1971 for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, it was rising in several sections of Detroit’s social, political, and economic firmament. Things were looking promising for Motown with the release of Marvin Gaye’s breakthrough recording “What’s Going On.” And African Americans were making some headway in the upper echelons of the big three—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—as well as automobile dealers. If the league was in a political retreat, Gaye, his emotional state always an issue, was looking for a refuge from the public after the death of his singing partner, Tammi Terrell, which rocked his musical future. When he proposed his concept album What’s Going On as the solution to societal problems and his own troubled condition, Gordy and his management team resisted. They said the songs were too long, too formless, and would find no appeal or traction with listeners, even his most devoted fans. Gaye told them that either they’d release the album, or he’d never record for them again. “The ploy worked,” wrote his biographer David Ritz. “Marvin won, and the winnings were bigger than even he had imagined. His first self-produced, self-written album altered not only his career but his very life.”1 The album’s narrative, Gaye’s antiwar message, and his plea for peace both in the world and his troubled life were all the therapy he needed to recapture his musical genius, to reclaim his place among the best soul singers and composers of his generation. Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, David Porter, and others had provided the funky wedge, but Gaye supplied the passionate cry, the urgency that gives his music an eternal presence.

Whatever the revolutionary content of the Motown sound, it meant little to the machinations of the Detroit Police Department. There was a foreboding uptick in police violence with the creation of a secret unit in the city’s police department, the dreaded death squad STRESS, an acronym for Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets. This undercover decoy squad was fully mobilized and operating with alarming and frightening effect. Each evening extended the pattern of ever more disturbing assaults on the black community, particularly its young men. Mayor Roman Gribbs, an ex-sheriff of Wayne County, who had defeated black candidate Richard Austin in 1969, and Police Chief John Nichols were determined to reduce crime in the city by brute force, even if it meant reducing the black population. During STRESS’s first year as a death squad–cum–SWAT team, the city’s police force had the highest number of civilian killings per capita of any American police department.2 During its three and a half years of existence, STRESS officers shot and killed 24 men, 22 of them African American. So Gaye’s question was never more apt. In effect, one third of the homicides were committed by STRESS, which represented only 2 percent of the total department. To justify these numbers, which included the body counts of more than five hundred raids without search warrants, the unit’s commander, James Barron, cited the dangers the cops encountered when invading people’s homes.

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