During the 1967 riot thousands of national guard and federal airborne troops entered Detroit with tanks and machine guns to suppress the riot.  One of the staging areas was here, at the Detroit Light Guard Armory on 8 Mile, where a cold war era relic rusts away.

  8 MILE ROAD 

Until the early 1960's Detroit's African American citizens were confined in a virtual ghetto through collusive real estate practices and compliant police activities.

In 1967 decades of injustice exploded into a massive urban riot.  Following the riot, real estate agents reversed their practices and now exploited racial fears by selling houses to Afro Americans in once predominantly Euro-American neighborhoods of Detroit but not its suburbs north of 8 Mile. The practice, called blockbusting, fed a racial panic and led to a boom in sales for the agent.

The resultant mass exodus would cause City of Detroit's population to decline by nearly one half to  its present day population of  950,000.