shooting at people – Photography, aviation and flight simulation

Cover page of the book Black Detroit by Herb Boyd.

As the author Herb Boyd writes, « this is the first book to consider black Detroit from a long view, in a full historical tableau. » (p.14). If you are looking for a significant black person that influenced Detroit’s history, he or she is in the book.

The author covers the arrival of Blacks in Detroit through the Underground Railroad the type of work they could find, the music they created, their need to have their own church to avoid racism, the work at Ford, the influence of trade unions, the poor housing conditions, etc.

Of course, there are several paragraphs on racism, police repression and useless violence, the problems caused by the KKK and how a few individuals dealt with it, the Smith Act, the American Civil War and the desire the end slavery, the presence of Rosa Parks in the city and Nelson Mandela’s visit in Detroit in 1990.

There is not only something on the past history and development of Detroit but also thoughts on the future of the city and how it will have to deal with the fact that there are so many people choosing to live in the suburbs instead of in Detroit itself.

Since the fight for equal rights, racism, police repression and the useless deaths of so many black individuals have continued to be an important problem in United States, I have chosen a few quotes from the book on those subjects.

I also chose a paragraph on Nelson Mandela’s visit in Detroit. When Nelson Mandela left United States to fly back to South Africa, his plane had to do a stopover in Iqaluit, in Canada’s Arctic. I was working as a flight service specialist (FSS) at Iqaluit in 1990, so I could see him and Winnie attending an official ceremony in the middle of the night at the airport’s terminal. You can read the real life stories in Iqaluit on my website.

Detroit and Canada.

« In 1795, Detroit was still under British jurisdiction, and the city was a de facto part of Upper Canada. » (p.22)

« Judge Woodward stipulated in a later ruling that if black Americans were to acquire freedom in Canada, they could not be returned to slavery in the United States. “Two of Denison’s children […] took advantage of this ruling by escaping to Canada for a few years and then returning to Detroit as free citizens”. Theirs was a landmark case and would be cited as a precedent in a number of appeals for emancipation by enslaved African Americans. (p.25)

The Smith Act

“The Smith Act, was written so that labor organization and agitation for equal rights could be construed as sedition and treason, the same as actually fighting to overthrow the government by force” (p.162)

Police repression and brutality

“[…] Twenty-five blacks had been killed in Detroit while in police custody in 1925, eight times the number killed under police supervision that year in New York City, whose black population was at least twice as large” (p.112)

“During STRESS’s (Stop the Robberies and Enjoy Safe Streets) first year as a death squad – cum – SWAT team [near 1970], the city’s police force had the highest number of civilian killings per capita of any American police department. During its three and a half years of existence, STRESS officers shot and killed 24 men, 22 of them African American.[…] Among the STRESS officers, none was as seemingly problematic as crew chief Raymond Peterson. Before he was assigned to STRESS, he had amassed a record number of complaints. During his first two years on the squad, he took part in nine killings and three nonfatal shootings. Bullets from Peterson’s gun killed five of the victims. No charges were brought in any of these cases.” (p.226-227)

The policeman Raymond Peterson and a murder charge in Detroit in the seventies.

“[Around 1999] gentrification was one thing to worry about, but police brutality was a far more menacing immediacy for young black Detroiters. They were keenly aware there was little mercy awaiting them from the police, nor from school conselors or employment agencies, and certainly not from the drug dealers” (p.292)

“[Around 2001] Detroit, according to reports from several local papers, had the highest number of fatal shootings among the nation’s largest cities” (p.300)

“Throughout the nation over the previous decade, from 1999 to 2009, gun violence had taken the lives of thousands of young black men and women, and hundreds of them were unarmed victims of unwarranted police violence. Few of these terrible tragedies were as heart-wrenching as the killing of seven-year-old Aiyana Jones by a police officer in May 2010. It was around midnight and Aiyana was asleep on the couch with her grandmother nearby watching television. Neither of them had time to react to the thud at the door nor the flash-bang grenade tossed into the living room by the police at the start of the raid.

Officer Joseph Weekley immediately began firing his MP5 submachine gun blindly through the window into the smoke and chaos. One of the bullets entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck. She was killed instantly. The SWAT team had come looking for a murder suspect who lived upstairs but left with only a dead child. […]. » (p.327-328).

Education

“Ethelene Crockett, having raised three children, earned a medical degree from Howard University in 1942. She completed her internship at Detroit Receiving Hospital, and because no Detroit hospital would accept an African American woman physician, she did her residency in New York City. Finally in 1952, she was accepted at a hospital in Detroit, becoming the first black woman in her field of obstetrics and gynecology to practice in the state.” (p.163)

No middle-class for young blacks.

“With the traditional routes to middle-class success closed, young black Detroiters sought other means of survival, mainly via the underground economy.” (p.254)

Nelson Mandela in Detroit

“In the summer of 1990, Nelson Mandela toured the United States after spending twenty-seven years in prison. […] When Mandela and his wife, Winnie, emerged from the plane [in Detroit], one of the first people they recognized was Rosa Parks. Nelson Mandela stated that Parks had been his inspiration during the long years he was jailed on Robben Island and that her story had inspired South African freedom fighters’” (p.268).

Detroit’s future

“Most Detroiters live in neighborhoods, and in these areas, development is uneven. There are some flashes of improvement, but by and large, communities are still struggling with unemployment, crime, and low-achieving schools. Detroit is a city with large expanses of uninhabited land and is sprinkled with thirty-one thousand vacant and dilapidated houses. In various pockets throughout town, community-based organizations have worked tirelessly to maintain their respective areas against a tide of neglect and disinvestment. The current mayoral administration has tried to use an assortment of methods to arrest the decline of the neighborhoods, with moderate success. This gargantuan task has been assisted with massive aid from the Obama administration, but the city still has major hurdles ahead with a large poor, unskilled, and semiliterate population.” (p.342).

Title : Black Detroit

Author : Herb Boyd

Edition : Amistad

ISBN : 978-0-06-234662-9

(Precedent story: the long awaited aircraft)

This is where we worked and lived in Inukjuak in 1982. One of the buildings holds the Transport Canada flight service station.

Note: It is only an out of the ordinary true life story. Normal relations between Whites and Inuit are entirely peaceful. Besides, we all know of situations in the southern cities where whites have tried to shoot people. The following story therefore presents an unusual and rare case.

In a Northern Quebec village named Inukjuak,in 1982-1983, the buildings layout was simple. On top of a nearby hill was the whole village, populated overwhelmingly by Inuit. Down the hill, near the airstrip and Hudson Bay, were the few buildings where Environment Canada employees and Transport Canada flight services specialists (FSS) could be found. There were only Whites living and working in this area.

One evening during winter` 82 -` 83, someone knocked on the door and entered immediately without waiting for an answer. It was the auxiliary police officer. He was an unarmed young man who occasionally helped the unique village policeman. He told us that the policeman was absent from the village and that he must fend for himself. He urged us: “Lock your doors and turn off the lights, do not go out unless it is essential, as there is one Inuit armed with .303 caliber rifle who wants to shoot white people.”

It was, of course, a complete surprise for everyone. It was easy to deduce that the shooter looking for Whites would choose the easiest solution and head towards our buildings to shoot somebody at random. Not wanting to be a sitting duck, I went to my room and grabbed a locked suitcase that had been sleeping for months on a shelf. I took out a Remington Classic 700 BDL Bolt Action and loaded the magazine.

We established a plan, with the other two persons in the house. Two of us would have to get out and head toward the flight service station, where there was an unarmed FSS female employee working alone. Chances were that she was not aware of what was going on. One of us would bring her back home and the other one would then complete her night shift at her place, since the station could not be left unattended.

While we would be gone, there would be one person left in the house with a gun to protect himself if necessary. This employee had just arrived in Inukjuak. I still remember his reaction when we were getting ready to leave. I can hear him say: “But what is this crazy place?”

We closed the outdoor floodlights and headed to the flight service station with our weapons. Walking in the dark, crouched like soldiers during wartime, we arrived at the Transport Canada building where we found the employee occupied at her normal duties, completely ignoring the possible presence of a nearby shooter. I took her place to complete the night shift while she returned home accompanied by an armed employee.

Once alone in the operating room, I shut the lights while keeping a small lamp to illuminate the console radio frequencies. I lay the rifle flat on a counter, the lock removed for faster use if needed. The radio console was located opposite a large window: it left us totally exposed to anyone who would decide to shoot through it. I therefore had to stay away from the normal working position, except when responding to radio calls, until we received fresh news about the shooter.

Twin Otter inbound for Inukjuak on a very windy day in 1982.

The improvised night shift ended without incident in the station, but I learned that multiple shots were fired at a vehicle traveling near our facilities. Projectiles pierced doors, but luckily they did not hit the vehicle occupants. Within hours of the event, a tactical response team of the Sûreté du Québec arrived in Inukjuak and controlled the shooter.

Even if this story took place decades ago, I still remember very well the atmosphere on that evening. When untrained civilians must load firearms to potentially use them against another human, it cannot be forgotten.

(Next story: emergency clean-up)

For more real life stories of a FSS in Inukjuak, click on the following link: Flight service specialist (FSS) in Inukjuak