Review: Hurt, Baby, Hurt

Hurt, Baby, Hurt by III Scott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I first read of this book in "How Burn, Baby, Burn Became Hurt, Baby, Hurt" by Megan Douglass in Fifth Estate #417, Winter 2025. This review of the book piqued my interest, so I obtained a copy to read. With dialect, slang, and emotion this tells of Scott's journey from tough family life to area institutions to be social club in Detroit that became a locus for the heavy-handed policing that lit a match to simmering racial tension leading to an uprising of looting, property damage and for many like Scott imprisonment and fines. Scott makes no apologies and is candid and forthcoming in telling his story.

In page vii of the forntmatter, Scott sets the tone with an epigraph:

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find far more and far more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion.” C. P. Snow Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science New York, December 28, 1960

Scott actually found Hawthorne Center, the state-run psychiatric hospital for children, a paradise.

This Hawthorne Center place was like another world. It wasn’t like the Page 11 → big city streets— cars, smoggy atmosphere, junkies, nasty old buildings, winos and old beat- up prostitutes standing on the corner. I mean, Hawthorne Center had clean, modern buildings like I’d never seen in my life, let alone live in one. I fell in love with the place.
...
The people were nice and loving; it was a dream come true. The one thing I learned first off here was to hate violence that I knew so well back home. It wasn’t just the violence of my father but the violence of anger being expressed by anyone towards me or anybody.

Later in life and in the chapter "Ain’t Got No Head That Belongs" he does find himself in less ideal facilities.

The administrative heads were all white and a good percentage of the counselors and teachers were white except for a few middle- class negroes here and there. So we had all these professional people who were the only unique people in the whole entire school: a nigger- making factory. Yah, a nigger factory. Every student was on their assembly belt...

More on school history relevant to this period is at riseupdetroit.org

The blind pig, once the United Community League for Civic Action, that was the flashpoint is described"

We called our joint the club instead of “United Community League for Civic Action,” which was formed as a political organization in 1964 by my father and his brother in an effort to involve Black people in the political (American they tell me) process.

Triggered by harsh policing, that night this became "Get Some Loot and Scoot"

We left the club and ran down the street toward Clairmont. There were a few people standing on the corner. I crossed the street and stopped in front of this drug store, looking around, wanting to do something. "Hey, let’s tear this motherfucker down!" I screamed to the people standing on the corner. They just sort of stood there and looked at me, not moving. I grabbed this litter basket in front of me and threw it through the window of the drug store. (I had to destroy something.) An alarm began to ring. Everybody began to run.

On reflection, an unhinged night of property crimes and police brutality is seen portentously.

...pops gave me one of his famous lectures on how he viewed the riot. “All the people have had their revolutions, and we’re the last. The Negro group is the last. It’s something that’s got to come; they can’t stop it. It’s something that every group has gone through. So now it gets down to the Negro; when his revolution comes, it won’t be no surprise to the people I know. We just happen to be the last group, that’s all.

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