Pressure Makes Diamonds. Valerie Graves

to violence by raiding police, some of my frustrated brethren were throwing down a blazing gauntlet and being met with armed responses. Looking at the police and military being marshalled against them, I was afraid they were courting self-destruction and risking all of our lives. The fierce lack of give-a-fuck represented by flaming Molotov cocktails, looting, and sniper fire was a new and terrifying feature of a world where it seemed anything could happen. So, too, was the sight of National Guardsmen and the 101st Airborne soldiers patrolling the streets in trucks and tanks, fear in their eyes and guns in their hands. As assault vehicles rolled past ravaged buildings, I felt sympathy for the small-business owners who stood, discouraged and sometimes weeping, in front of stores that might have been built over a lifetime and burned out in an instant. The terror in the faces of mothers whose sons were running wild past gun-toting soldiers was also not lost on me, especially after the alleged murder of at least two black men by police officers at the Algiers Motel.

      If the furious looting and burning of stores and businesses had begun as an expression of anger at a system that seemed weighted against the poor, they also provided an opportunity for those same people to take advantage of the “five-finger discount” that broken and breached storefronts put in front of them. During the Detroit unrest, while Ruth Ann and I were visiting a friend in Pontiac, the girl’s male cousins came by and used the dining room table to gleefully divide the spoils from a looted Detroit liquor store they had hit that morning. Other people were clearly torn between their disapproval of the riot itself and their desire to grab some free stuff while the getting was good. One black woman, being interviewed by a local TV station, decried the rioters and their violence on camera, saying, “I think it’s terrible, just terrible,” while diligently searching for the mate to a shoe she had just scavenged from a looted footwear store.