By Emily Warn for PoetryFoundation.org
Apr 21, 2011
Detroit Riots
It was 1967 and Detroit was burning. The poet Ken Mikolowski and his wife, the painter Ann Mikolowski, sprayed water through garden hoses to douse embers landing on the roof of their home in the western section of the city. Several days earlier, Detroit had erupted into violence so deadly and destructive that the governor labeled it an “insurrection,” a legal designation that allowed Lyndon B. Johnson to send in federal troops. “The fires spread indiscriminately,” Ken recalls today. “When they reached our neighborhood the fire department refused to fight them because of alleged snipers and street violence.” Five days later, when the federal troops had restored some semblance of order, 43 people were dead, 467 injured, and 7,200 in jail, and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed. “But no one in our neighborhood was about to flee," Ken explains, "either then or afterward, during the great white flight to the suburbs.”
The Mikolowskis were part of the Artists’ Workshop, a community of artists, poets and musicians who lived and worked in the Cass Corridor, a gritty, once-grand neighborhood surrounding Wayne State University. In cheaply rented, previously abandoned storefronts and homes, members of the community ran half a dozen or so presses and published small magazines, including the Fifth Estate, the longest running anarchist newspaper in the United States. On its pages, political commentary and notices about anti-war rallies and gallery shows were printed alongside poetry.
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