It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid an unlicensed after hours bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men. While they were arranging for transportation, a sizable crowd of onlookers gathered on the street, having witnessed the raid. Later, in a memoir, William Walter Scott III, a doorman whose father was running the raided bar, took responsibility for starting the riot by inciting the crowd and throwing a bottle at a police officer.
After the police left, the crowd began looting an adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale looting began throughout the neighborhood. The Michigan State Police, Wayne County sheriffs, and the Michigan Army National Guard were alerted, but because it was Sunday, it took hours for Police Commissioner Ray Girardin to assemble sufficient manpower. Meanwhile, witnesses described seeing a "carnival atmosphere" on 12th Street. The DPD, inadequate in number and wrongly believing that the rioting would soon expire, just stood there and watched. Police did not make their first arrest until 7 a.m., three hours after the raid
The riot raged for five days.Looting and arson were widespread. There were some 483 fires on Monday alone. Thousands of soldiers from the Michigan National Guard were called in, along with tanks. The National Guardsmen fired off more than 150,000 bullets over the course of the riot. After a game, Tigers left fielder Willie Horton, a Detroit resident who had grown up not far from 12th Street, drove to the riot area and stood on a car in the middle of the crowd while still in his baseball uniform. Despite Horton's impassioned pleas, he could not calm the crowd.
Detroit Police were found to have committed many acts of abuse against both blacks and whites who were in their custody.
Although only 26 of the over 7,000 arrests involved snipers, and not one person accused of sniping was successfully prosecuted, the fear of snipers precipitated many police searches (in Algiers Motel Incident, three black teenagers were beaten to death by police who thought they might be snipers). The "searching for weapons" caused many homes and vehicles to be scrutinized. Curfew violations were also common sparks to police brutality. The Detroit Police's 10th Precinct routinely abused prisoners; as mug shots later proved, many injuries came after booking. Women were stripped and fondled while officers took pictures. White landlords from New York visiting their building were arrested after a sniper call and beaten so horribly that "their testicles were still black and blue two weeks after the incident."
Tanks and machine guns were used in the effort to keep the peace. Film footage and photos that were viewed internationally showed a city on fire, with tanks and combat troops in firefights in the streets.
The Michigan Civil Rights Commission intervened in the riot to try to protect the rights of arrestees. The arrival of the CRC was not well received by the police saying the observers were interfering with police work. The Detroit Police Officers Association protested to Governor George Romney, "We resent the Civil Rights Commission looking over our shoulders, just waiting for some officer to stub his toe." At one precinct, a white officer "bitterly abused" a black CRC observer, saying that "all people of his kind should be killed."
Forty-three people were killed, 33 black and 10 white, and whole blocks of the city went up in flames. 2,509 businesses reported looting or damage, 388 families were rendered homeless or displaced, and 412 buildings were burned or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from property damage ranged from $40 million to $45 million.
The riots brought out the best, as well as the worst, in people. As Louis Cassells reported on the ground for UPI, "At a moment when race relations might seem to have sunk to the lowest possible level, whites and Negroes were working together, through their churches, to minister to the hungry and homeless. The effort transcended denominational lines. By Wednesday [July 26, 1967], Protestants, Catholics and Jews had established an interfaith emergency center to coordinate the relief work. District collection centers were set up at scores of churches and synagogues across the city. The food, clothing, bedding and cash contributed through them brought to the interfaith center, from which aid was distributed strictly according to need, without regard for race, creed, or color.... Acts of kindness and generosity were not confined to religious groups. Unions, led by the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters, joined with industrial firms in setting up a truck pool to transport relief supplies into the riot area. It was not just a matter of white people being kind to black people. Often it was the other way around, I saw Negro families bringing cool drinks of water to white National Guardsmen standing post in blazing sun. On several occasions, white reporters--trapped on the streets during wild gun battles between Guardsmen and snipers--were taken into the relative safety of nearby Negro homes, even though opening the door to admit them was a real risk to the Negro family. People can be pretty wonderful--even in a riot."
After the riots, many of the white residents of the city moved to the suburbs. Thousands of homes were abandoned, and the city's population plunged from 1.6 million to 992,000 in just a few years. By 1990, Detroit was one of the poorest cities in America.
Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, wrote in 1994:
"The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totaling twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969."
According to economist Thomas Sowell
"Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit's black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair. Detroit's population today is only half of what it once was, and its most productive people have been the ones who fled."
The riot was finally quelled on July 28, 1967 after both Michigan's Army National Guard and the United States Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions were called in. The rioting received extensive media coverage and was part of the "Long, hot summer of 1967". Its scale was the worst since the 1863 New York draft riots, even surpassing the 1943 Detroit race riot; it would remain the worst until the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
I lived in Detroit at the time. Or rather, I lived in Warren, which is completely surrounded by Detroit and in turn completely surrounds another city called Center Line. Detroit geography is weird. I lived in Detroit.
I was in second grade. All I knew about it was there was a 4 PM curfew. We could go to school, but we had to be home and inside the house by 4. I heard someone talk about Black Panthers once. That's all I knew.
A few years ago, Toni and I went to visit my stepson, who was interning at Detroit Receiving hospital. He knows everything there is to know about gunshot wounds. Compared to my memories, it was a depressing sight, neighborhood after neighborhood mostly or completely abandoned; a 20 story building with all the windows blown out. If you lived there, it would be in some ways glorious. Your commute to work would be trivial since you'd be traveling on roads built for three times as many people as were using them. You could buy a really nice house for $30,000. If you are police or a teacher, the city would pay you to take a house.
There aren't many bright spots left there. One was the Heidelberg Project, an entire mostly abandoned neighborhood turned into an outdoor art exhibit by one guy. It was taken down (by the artist) earlier this year but you can still read about it and see pictures online.
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