Detroit Takes Center Stage in Occupy America Movement

By Karen Hudson Samuels/Tell Us Detroit

DETROIT, MI (Tell Us Det) - The Occupy Wall Street movement that started six weeks ago in New York moved into Detroit Friday afternoon. Carrying signs and chanting “Wall Street got bailed out, we got sold out!” several hundred protestors gathered before the Sprit of Detroit before marching in mass to Grand Circus Park.

We stopped a marcher carrying a sign that read “We Are The 99% We Weren’t Invited to the Wall Street Party”.

Holding the sign was Linda Ewing a UAW member who is employed but she said “I am very concerned that middle class families in this country have been losing ground for a decade and all the gains and income have been going to the to the top 1%”.

Overall, the movement has seen institutions and politicians as serving the top 1 percent, not the other 99.

The protestors in Detroit, like those cities around the country, are frustrated by a mix of economic and social issues: The very rich not paying their fair share of taxes; states usurping union bargaining rights, foreclosures, homelessness and poverty.

Organizer Michael Shallal said all these issues are directly connected to corporations and inaction in Washington.

A cross section of virtually every demographic group was represented in the growing crowd in Detroit; young people, retirees, whites, blacks, city residents and suburbanites.

Gabriel Harrison, a community college student from Mount Clemens said she was out demonstrating because there are no jobs. Harrison was not too optimistic about the future “It’s not going to be good because I can’t go the school that I want to and I refuse to take out student loans.”

The Occupy Detroit protestors plan to occupy the Grand Circus Park area with sit-ins, pickets and other forms of protest over the next sixty days.

Mayor Dave Bing and Police Chief Ralph L. Godbee Jr. issued a joint statement Thursday afternoon saying, "We are working to ensure that all citizens are able to assemble and express themselves peacefully and in accordance with the law."