1970s Timeline

• "By 1970, there were 250,000 written grievances at GM alone, or one for every two workers." (Georgakas 33)
• "...Local 160 of the GM Technical Center, representing 4000 mainly white skilled workers with the highest-paying jobs, was among the most militant locals in the UAW. Its members dropped nails, narled traffic, and formed car barricades during the 1970 GM strike." (Georgakas 39)
• "...but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little over eight million vehicles." (Georgakas 101)
• "Detroit had always been known as a violent city, but by 1970 the situation was clearly out of hand. There were over 23,000 reported robberies, which meant that a least one out of every sixty-five Detroiters had been a victim. An army of drug addicts lived in the remains of 15,000 inner-city houses abandoned for an urban-renewal program which never materialized. Over a million guns were in the hands of hte population, and union officials estimated that half the workers came to the plants armed with one weapon or another." (Georgakas 202)
• "On April 7, 1970, the Detroit Board of Education voluntarily adopted a plan to effect a more balanced distribution of black and white students in twelve of the city's twenty-one high schools. This so-called April 7 Plan was to take effect over a three-year period. The plan was designed to reduce segregation in a school system that was then 63.6 percent black...The state legislature, responding to powerful public pressure, passed legislation that was signed by governor as PA 48 on July 7, 1970, which in effect nullified the plan. The following month the board members who had supported the plan were recalled, the governor appointed four new board members, and the April 7 Plan was rescinded." (Woodford 229)
• January 1971: "...the atmosphere of permissiveness regarding police misconduct and the growing chaos in the streets had prepared the way for a new police unit called STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets). This unit was a secret, elit esection of Detroit undercover assault squads...[and was] estimated to have no more than 100 men. The favorite STRESS method was the 'decoy' operation in which one police officer acted as a potential victim in some area where crime was likely to occur. As the decoy was attacked, other STRESS officers moved in for the arrest." (Georgakas 202)
• April-August, 1971 : "Eleven deaths occurred between April and August of 1971, and all but one of the victims were black." (Georgakas 205)
• Sept 23, 1971: "...more than 5000 people were mobilized by th State of Emergency Committee to demand the abolition of STRESS" (Georgakas 205)
• "On April 6, 1971, the NAACP suit went to trial in U.S. District Court before Judge Stephen J. Roth. After extensive hearings, Judge Roth ruled, on September 21, 1971, that Detroit schools were indeed segregated and they had been deliberately segregated over a long period of time." (Woodford 229)
• "...in June 1972, Roth settled on a plan for the busing of students between Detroit and fifty-three suburban school districts across the tri-county area. The plan involved about 780,000 children. At the time of this ruling Detroit schools were 65 percent black, the suburban schools less than 10 percent black...The ruling was appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, which in December 1972 affirmed Roth's ruling of segregation in Detroit's schools as well as his conclusion that the desegregation remedy must not be confined to only the city of Detroit." (Woodford 229)
• March 9, 1972- Rochester Street Massacre: "...three black STRESS officers observed a man later identified as a Wayne County sheriff's deputy walk into a building at 3210 Rochester with what appeared to be a gun. The STRESS squad called other police and entered the apartment with guns blazing. Wayne County Sheriff's Deputy Henry Henderson was killed, and three other deputies were seriously wounded. According to subsequent court testimony, all the deputies might have been killed if Patrolman Richard Herold had not arrived on the scene and put a stop to the carnage...Exactly what transpired at Rochester Street was never made clear." (Georgakas 204)
• March 26, 1972 "... a rally of over 2000 people at the University of Detroit stadium in support of a petition campaign to abolish STRESS and a lawsuit against Mayor Gribbs, Commissioner Nichols, and Prosecutor Cahalan...The petition campaign was to gain over 40,000 signatures." (Georgakas 205)
• "'For the first time in the history of the UAW, the union mobilized to keep a plant open.' - Bill Bonds, WXYZ-TV News, speaking of events at the Mack stamping plant, August 16, 1973.” (Georgakas 227)
• 1973: "...that November Michigan Senator Coleman A. Young was elected the first black mayor of Detroit, defeating former city police commissioner John F. Nichols. At this time, blacks made up about half of the city's population. Young won support from more than 90 percent of black voters and about 10 percent of white voters...On January, 1974, Coleman A. Young took office as mayor of Detroit, and for the next twenty years he was to serve as the city's chief executive. He was elected mayor five consecutive times, thus coming the city's longest-serving mayor." (Woodford 218-219)
• "'I will lead a business resurgence that will produce jobs by the thousands, revitalize our downtown, and our entire city. I will move Detroit forward on a program that includes new port facilities, a stadium, rapid transit, recreational facilities, and housing.'- Coleman Young, quoted in campaign literature, Autumn 1973" (Georgakas 222)
• "Carefully picking its way through the Detroit reality, the U.S. News & World Report of December 10 was enraptured by the latest plans for building a new Detroit, plans which, like the old plans for building a new Detroit, concentrated on buildings, professional classes, and a narrow strip of waterfront. The heart of the new program was a $500 million Renaissance Center with hotels, luxury apartments, office buildings, and quality entertainment facilities to be built on the riverfront, directly to the east of Woodward Avenue." (Georgakas 238)
• "In 1973 the number of homicide victims in Detroit was triple the death toll on all sides in the civil disturbances that took place in Northern Ireland during the same year." (Georgakas 4)
• 1973: "Called the Health Research Group Study of Disease among Workers in the Auto Industry, it was based on figures compiled by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and was written by two medical doctors, Jannette Sherman and Sidney Wolfe. The report estimated 65 on-the-job deaths per day among auto workers, for a total of some 16,000 annually. Approximately half of these deaths were from heart attacks. There were also some 63,000 cases of disabling diseases and about 1,700,000 cases of lost or impaired hearing...Even these limited figures made it clear that more auto workers were killed and injured each year on the job than soldiers were killed and injured during any year of the war in Vietnam." (Georgakas 105)
• "The new contract, the election for Mayor, and the murder rate were prime coffee-break topics in the fall of 1973 when Detroit workers got an unexpected boost from black Judge Damon Keith sitting in the Federal District Court. Judge Keith ruled that Detroit Edison had been guilty of discriminating against blacks. He punished the company by ordering it to pay more than $4 million and to change its employment practices at once." (Georgakas 236)
• "The bleak Detroit winter hit with its usual cacophony of whining engines as the city ended 1973 by establishing several all time records. Homocides reached a historic peak; car production reached a historic peak; and the earnings of General Motors reached a historic peak. Workers worried about wholesale layoffs just as the prices of fuel, food, and other necessities also reached all-time peaks." (Georgakas 238)
• “Consumers worried about the shortage of gasoline quit buying large, low-mileage cars like Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles. Sales of those lines fell by over 50 percent, and Detroit automakers began to retool to produce smaller, more economical cars...During most of 1974, official unemployment in Michigan ran to more than 10 percent." (Georgakas 237)
• "Between 1970-1980 alone more than 310,000 white residents fled for the suburbs. The citys population dropped from 1,511,482 in 1970 to 1,203,339 in 1980, while the suburban population rose from 2,688,449 to 3,549,425 during this same time period. Yet the percentage of blacks living in the city during this period rose from 43.7 percent to 63 percent. Thus, by 1980, Detroit had one of the highest black population of any northern U.S. city." (Woodford 221)
• "In its search for a bigger bottom line, the auto industry moved its plants or production elsewhere-other states, other countries- and outsourced more of its work. This process wiped out over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in Detroit between 1976 and 1986. For the once-dominant United Auto Workers Union, this signified a loss of 125,000 members in the area- 40 percent of its dues payers- between 1979-1985." (Gerogakas 236)