Shattered glass & mind: Bill Scott

[3d123]

Bill McGraw has an interesting expose over at Bridge Magazine, on the man purportedly behind the start of the '67 riot.

Part One
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Scott, tall and lean, mounted a car and began to preach to a crowd long accustomed to the harsh tactics of the overwhelmingly white Detroit police in black neighborhoods: “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherf—— come down here any time they want and mess us around?”“Hell, no!” people yelled back.
Scott walked into an alley and grabbed a bottle, seeking “the pleasure of hitting one in the head, maybe killing him,” he remembers thinking. Making his way into the middle of the crowd for cover, he threw the bottle at a sergeant standing in front of the door.
The missile missed, shattering on the sidewalk. A phalanx of police moved toward the crowd, then backed off. As the paddy wagons drove away, bottles, bricks and sticks flew through the air, smashing the windows of departing police cars. Bill Scott said he felt liberated.
“For the first time in our lives we felt free. Most important, we were right in what we did to the law.”

It's a fascinating examination of a person simply on a human level, of the dynamics in his life that put him at that point, where it led, what came of the man... A rather somber consideration told partly through the words of his ex-wife and estranged son.

It's also interesting to consider how dynamics shape a child, considering Bill Scott's youth, as compared to his own son -- as he builds his own identity while met by conceivably, racially motivated experiences. As he notes: He's fortunate to have resources to pull upon -- family, friends, community and lawyers -- those far different than his father.

Further, what any of it means, or matters...

[canuck]

Thanks for the story.

This reminded me of a documentary film on the life of Nina Simone I saw on Netflix the other night. She had trained at a very young age to bloom into what she thought could be the first black female classical pianist. She had to become a jazz singer accompanying herself on the piano. In spite of her successes, she devolved into a revolutionary, an enraged xk activist and ended up living in Liberia for a while, then Holland and France. Her career had been torpedoed by her inability to accept the serious grievances of living as black in her country. You can also find the same depressing situation examining Paul Robeson, another famed black artist who defected to the Soviet Union. He found out Russia wasn't all apple blossoms too.

[3d123]

I'll have to check out the film -- there's a decent write up on Nina Simone at the New Yorker, as well.

[Honky Tonk]

I saw it @ the DFT and really enjoyed it. Though I never got to see her live, I remember her from my youth, and still have a couple of her CD's in the collection. I enjoyed the documentary, if it was the same one. I heard there are several floating around.