Who remember the 1970 Memorial Park Riots?

[Danny]

In 1970 Memorial Park in Royal Oak, MI. was used as a hippie and flowerchildren commune area just like Haight and Ashbury Streets. When concern neighbors call the Royal Oak Police about illegal street drug sales, they close the park. Then hundreds of white youths begin to riot. It spread further northward to Birmingham. The riots lasted three days until the police stop it from spreading to other middle class white neighborhoods.

Did any of you D-YESERS were at Memorial Park in 1970s? Do you all know about the riots. Did you all have friends and relatives who went to Memorial Park at the time of the riots? We're some of forum members lived near Memorial Park at the time where hippies and flowerchildren did their peace culture before the riots?

Any thoughts?

Here's one of the photos http://dlxsimg.lib.wayne.edu/cgi/i/i...viewid=16692_3

[Honky Tonk]

I don't know, there's something about white, middle-class, kids rioting, for no apparent reason, that I just can't sympathize with.

[FormerDetroiter]

I was living in Haight Ashbury in 1970. It was a neighborhood not a park.

[dtowncitylover]

I wasn't alive to witness them, but I know my black sheep uncle was a part of these "riots". I would hardly say they were hippies or flowerchildren, just angsty, bored white teenagers.

[Dumpling]

I was at the Royal Oak Public Library on at least one of the three riot days.
There was a great view of the Royal Oak Police [[aka "pigs") donning their riot
gear in the police station parking lot and heading off to the riots. The Royal Oak
Daily Tribune showed a pic of a baby who had been hit in the face with a rock
while riding in a car down Woodward.
Not to defend the rioters' specific actions, not to condone throwing rocks at
defenseless infants, but the Vietnam draft had been in place for several years,
and there had been Vietnam mortalities in young people just a little older than
the rioters. To understate, there was not deep support for the Vietnam war
among this demographic.

[softailrider]

I was there when the police raided Memorial Park. They came in on horseback we all ran out of there. That's all I remember - I was on a lot of drugs back then!

[Hypestyles]

the old people still aren't listening. don't trust anyone over....

[EastsideAl]

I don't remember these specific riots, but there was a lot of this sort of thing going around in those days. It sounds a lot like what happened at Balduck Park on the east side or Hines Park out on the far west side around the same time. A couple of my cousins were in the Balduck Park disturbances. Like Dumpling says, there was a lot of anger among working-class white teens in those days, especially over often heavy-handed police enforcement of drug, alcohol, etc. laws, and the ongoing draft that was sucking so many kids into the pointless and seemingly endless horror of Vietnam.

[Jimaz]

Attachment 25012
THE SHE TRINITY -"CLIMB THAT TREE" [[1970)

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." When you say something, you should mean it. If a parent speaks of good examples, they shouldn't then do bad things instead. If a child loves that parent so much they challenge them to return to their better selves, they shouldn't be beaten for it. The children of 1968 basically asked for one thing: for their parents to honor the values they supposedly held. For that, they were demonized, beaten, or killed. For the next 40 years the unrepentant parents and their lesser clones have refused to come from the shadow of the dark side. Today we are in exact replays of the dangers the Generation of Love warned about; Ecology destroyed, civil rights walled up, a paranoid police state unchecked, the dissenting public treated as traitors, a spineless media sleepwalking, and more unending murder for profit [[war). The subtext under everything relevent for the last four decades is about the world trying to reconcile this struggle. For instance, the students in Paris who revolted in 1968 were the spiritual catalyst for the Punk explosion in Britain in 1976. The "Prague Spring" youth may have been crushed by the Russians in 1968, but a generation raised under the Wall rebelled in 1989 and brought down Communism country by country in six months. [[Completely despite Reagan, who took credit.) The Grunge/ Riot Grrl/ Concious Rap zeitgeist of the early 90's was a direct backlash of counterculture values against Reagan and Bush, and helped bring Clinton into office. [[And Gore and Kerry, if you go by the actual counts.) Even in popular films, the subtext of idealistic youth betrayed by their corrupted father figure is endlessly working itself out [[APOCALYPSE NOW, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, REDS, WALL STREET, ROGER & ME, TWIN PEAKS, FIGHT CLUB, THE MATRIX, MINORITY REPORT, KILL BILL, HERO, BATMAN BEGINS, V FOR VENDETTA, etc.). The struggle continues between the forces of awareness and those who would keep us in the dark. Climb the tree of knowledge anyway. The future belongs to the knowing.

About The She Trinity: They were a trio of Canadian musicians who found their way to England; Robyn Yorke [[drums), Shelley Gillespie [[guitar), and Sue Kirby [[bass?). Robyn revamped the line-up with Pauline Moran [[bass), Eileen Woodman [[keys), Barbara Thompson [[sax), and Liverpool belter Beryl Marsden. There were brief name changes and shake-ups. The final combo was Robyn, Eileen, Pauline, and now Inger Jonnsson on guitar. They released a cover of "Hair" in 1970, for which "Climb That Tree" was the B-side. This cover of a tune written by the psychedelic band The Onyx should've got far more attention, but the single sank without a trace. Resurrected recently on the 'DREAM GIRLS 6' compilation, it is as timely as ever.

• The She Trinity
• The Herstory Of Rock

[old guy]

I was there around that period of time, but must have missed all of that. Where was the park?

[Danny]

I was there around that period of time, but must have missed all of that. Where was the park?

.

On 13 Mile Rd. and Woodward Ave. near Coolidge HWY. In Royal Oak, MI.