Detroit Riot
The Detroit Riot, occurring from July 23 to July 28, 1967, was a significant event in a decade marked by urban racial unrest across the United States. Sparked by a minor police incident during a raid on an unlicensed bar, the situation escalated rapidly as tensions between the African American community and law enforcement boiled over. Despite a considerable number of African Americans holding stable jobs and owning homes, deep-seated frustrations related to discrimination and segregation contributed to the violence. The riot resulted in widespread looting and destruction, leading to the intervention of the National Guard and U.S. Army troops.
The aftermath revealed a troubling pattern of excessive force used by authorities, with a disproportionate number of the riot-related casualties being African Americans. In response, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission to investigate the causes of such unrest, concluding that systemic discrimination and social inequality fueled the riots rather than a direct confrontation with white individuals. The commission's findings pointed to a growing divide in American society, emphasizing the need for improved communication and understanding between races to address underlying issues of prejudice and inequality.
Detroit Riot
Date: July 23-28, 1967
The costliest riot in U.S. history. Forty-one people died, nearly two thousand were injured, and damage estimates ranged from a quarter to a half billion dollars.
Origins and History
Urban race riots, which had taken place in Harlem in New York City in 1964 and 1967 and Watts in Los Angeles in 1965, had become part of the social upheaval of the decade. The urban unrest peaked during the summer of 1967. From Omaha, Nebraska, to Washington, D.C., riots took place in nearly 150 U.S. cities. In a July 12-16 riot in Newark, New Jersey, twenty-seven people died, more than eleven hundred were injured, and property damage reached fifteen million dollars.
The Riot
Detroit, Michigan, was a curious place for violence to erupt. Many African Americans commanded high wages in the automobile factories and high positions in the liberal United Automobile Workers union. About 40 percent of Detroit’s 550,000 African Americans owned or were buying their own homes. Community leaders, both black and white, had made a civics lesson of the city’s bloody race riot of 1943, which had left thirty-four dead and moved President Franklin D. Roosevelt to send in federal troops. Detroit’s mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, had been elected with the support of the African American community.
However, a minor police incident on July 23 provided the spark that ignited the Detroit ghetto. An early-morning raid of a speakeasy on a rundown street resulted in knots of African American onlookers taunting the police. A brick crashed through the window of a police cruiser. At this point, the police could have either pulled out or used force to break up the crowd. They did neither. They dispatched cruisers but did nothing else; consequently, mobs gathered and started fires, then looting began. As the fires spread, so did the looting, creating a carnival atmosphere in the ghetto. Children joined adults in racing from stores with their arms full of groceries, liquor, or jewelry. Cars pulled up to businesses and their occupants filled them with appliances and other goods.
Both the mayor and the governor were paralyzed. To alleviate the summer heat and thereby calm inner-city residents, Mayor Cavanagh ordered more swimming pools opened, and Governor George Romney suggested seeding rain clouds above the ghetto. Neither police nor peacemakers could stop the riot.
In order to quell the riot, Governor Romney deployed the National Guard, and President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in U.S. Army paratroopers. Although the Army troops were able to secure their sector of the ghetto, events went badly elsewhere. The National Guard and the police seemed to assume a license to kill. A subsequent investigation by the Detroit Free Press found that most of the official reports about the forty-three riot-related deaths (all but eight of them African Americans) had been pure fabrications. Three African Americans were shot as they sat in a car. A deaf man was killed because he couldn’t hear a warning. A child holding a broom was gunned down. Finally, on the sixth day, July 28, the riot just burned itself out.
Impact
President Johnson moved quickly to appoint a commission to study the roots of urban racial unrest. The Kerner Commission, named for its chairman, Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, operated on the twin premises that the nation must ensure the safety of its people and that the nation must get at the root causes of racial strife.
The commission, which released its report in 1968, determined that the riots were not directed at white Americans but instead at their property and authority. It described a causal chain of “discrimination, prejudice, disadvantaged conditions, . . . all culminating in the eruption of disorder at the hands of youthful, politically aware activists.” The frustration experienced by African Americans living in the ghetto was found to have deep historical roots. The commission noted that the historical pattern of black-white relations had been “pervasive discrimination and segregation,” which had resulted in whites leaving the inner cities and thus creating black ghettos. Young African Americans, alienated by the conditions produced by discrimination and segregation, had flocked to the banner of black power.
The commission concluded that the United States was moving toward separate and unequal societies, white and black. It called for increased national communication among races in order to end stereotypes and hostility.
Additional Information
Richard N. Goodwin, a former speech writer for President Johnson, fits the Detroit riot into the context of the times in Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties. Journalist William Serrin’s article, “The Crucible,” in the January/February, 1991, issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, is a firsthand account of the riot.