Fifty years ago this month, a protest in Detroit turned into a riot, which turned into five days of violence that left dozens dead, thousands arrested and a city engulfed in flames. While the event is mostly remembered as a riot, others see it as a revolution — a demonstration of force by frustrated black Americans against aggressive policing in the city, set off by the late-night raid of an unlicensed black club.
Detroit-born poet Philip Levine(1928-2015) wrote the poem “They Feed They Lion” in 1968, a year after the riots, as a way to chronicle the rage he saw in the city over the failures of its institutions.
But Levine had been attuned to that feeling for years; working in Detroit auto shops in the 1950s, he told Detroit Magazine: “I saw that the people that I was working with … were voiceless in a way. In terms of the literature of the United States they weren’t being heard.” He said that his life work became trying to speak for them as best he could.