THINKING FOR OURSELVES

Then and Now

By Shea Howell

Michigan Citizen, July 29-Aug.4, 2007

This has been a week of remembrance. Throughout the Detroit metro area people have joined in events commemorating the rebellion of 1967.

At sunrise on Monday, July 23, I was part of a small group that gathered at the corner of Clairmont and Rosa Parks. We stood in a circle as Reverend Wilson, of the Tried Stone Baptist Church, asked us to pray not only for all those lost but for the strength and wisdom to restore our communities.

These rememberings, whether in large media events or in stories shared across the kitchen table, are an essential part of our coming to understand the soul of who we are. They carry the values that shape our views of ourselves and our relationships.

As part of the Detroit-City of Hope commemorations, I was responsible for collecting stories from people. There are three I want to share.

The first was offered by Julian Witherspoon during the panel discussion. He talked about going to history books and the Internet to read about the riots. After describing a scene of a man being shot, he said, "That's not what happened at all. The truth is a lot of innocent people got killed. I know. I was there. I was 10 years old, sitting on my front steps and I saw this man killed." He went on to describe how the man had been moving into a new apartment and not really aware of what was going on. When a young National Guardsmen yelled at him to stop, the man kept carrying things. Then the guardsmen shot him, the bullet blasting through him and into another man. Witherspoon's last image was that of the commander coming over and ripping the name tag off the guardsmen's jacket to obscure his identity.

A second story was from a woman who asked that her name not be used. She said she was 10 years old that summer. Like a lot of people, her family was not aware of the dimensions of the National Guard occupation at first. As she did on many days, she ran down the stairs to play jump rope. Turning the corner, she ran into a man in battle gear holding a bayonet. They both stopped and stared for a moment. Then she turned and fled back upstairs to her home. "I never told my mother. I was too afraid. I was afraid that she would go down and ask, 'What did you do to my baby?' and I was afraid for her."

Another woman, in her mid-twenties at the time, started to tell me a story about how hard it was for her to get home from work. But the story changed in the telling as she talked about a little girl killed by bullets shot through a ceiling, as National Guard troops reacted to a supposed sniper. The little girl had been sleeping on the floor in an effort to keep safe from bullets flying through windows. The woman had sent her home earlier, thinking she would be safe. Now 40 years later, with her own memories of hiding behind blanketed windows still vivid, her voice carried the regret of "if only..."

Knowing that what we read in history books and official accounts is often untrue, that sometimes terrified children try to protect parents from unknown dangers, that we survive while others die, and that deaths happen to communities and not just to individuals, are truths that many of us carry with us every day.

These memories are why we know that nothing good comes from armies of occupation, either here or in Iraq.

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