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Step Right Up, and Get Your Ticket to The Greatest Show on Earth

Harvard’s Three-Ring Circus, Starring the Minstrel Scholar, Roland Fryer

General Gordon Baker Jr. was a 24-year-old student activist at Detroit’s Wayne State University when he received a letter from the local draft board in 1965. He responded in writing that he had no interest in fighting in Vietnam but would gladly go to war

“when the call is made to free South Africa, when the call is made to liberate Latin America from the United Fruit Co., Kaiser, and Alcoa Aluminum Co., and from Standard Oil; when the call is made to jail the exploiting Brahmins in India in order to destroy the Caste System; when the call is made to free the black delta areas of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina; when the call is made to FREE 12TH STREET HERE IN DETROIT!”

Unsurprisingly, the draft board declined to give Baker a weapon of any kind, but his reference to 12th street was prophetic, for that was ground zero of Detroit’s 1967 uprising that erupted after the vice squad raided an after-hours speakeasy known colloquially as a “blind pig.” Nearly 17,000 police officers and soldiers patrolled African American neighborhoods during the siege, firing indiscriminately into nearby homes. The 46th Division of the National Guard, for example, fired 155,576 rounds of M-1 ammunition over a span of six days.

When finally the smoke had cleared, 43 people lay either dead or dying in what was the nation’s deadliest insurrection until the uprising in Los Angeles 25 years later after jurors acquitted four white police officers for assaulting a Black motorcyclist, Rodney King.

Ironically, Baker was not available to answer the call to liberate 12th Street in Detroit. He was in Cleveland when police raided the blind pig and arrested for violating curfew immediately upon his return. Still, he observed that during Detroit’s insurrection, patrol officers and the National Guard would only allow African Americans past their barricades if they were injured or heading to work. Said Baker, who would go on to co-found the League of Revolutionary Black Workers:

“That let us know that our only value to the system was as workers.”

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Black Republic Media is a monthly online publication that explores the afterlife of chattel slavery in America through documentary and long-form narrative journalism. Fundamentally, BRM is a critique of the white settler project from the perspective of 42 million Black people whose political and economic struggles, and acts of daily resistance remain mostly unaccounted for in American culture and yet are the cornerstones of public life in the New World.