Justice  /  Book Excerpt

The Rage and Rebellion of the Detroit Riots, Captured in One Poem

50 years later, Philip Levine's poem, "They Feed They Lion," helps us remember and understand that time.

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.