Detroit Riots

10 Key excerpts on "Detroit Riots"

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  Revolts, Protests, Demonstrations, and Rebellions in American History

  An Encyclopedia [3 volumes]

  • Steven L. Danver(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Locke, Hubert G. The Detroit Riot of 1967. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1969. Detroit Riots (1967) 991 Rutgers University. “The Detroit Riots of 1967.” http://www.67riots.rutgers.edu/ d_index.htm (accessed November 2, 2008). Sugrue, Thomas J. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sullivan, Will. “Summer in the City: Detroit and Newark Are Still Recovering from the Violence That Erupted 40 Years Ago.” U.S. News and World Report 143, no.3 (July 23, 2007): 34. 992 Detroit Riots (1967) Excessive Force Excessive force on the part of the police was among the major causes of the 1967 Detroit Riots. In a Detroit Free Press survey in the aftermath of the riots, residents identified police harassment and brutality as the number one problem that they faced in the period preceding the events of 1967. During the 1960s, the so-called “Big Four” or “Tac Squads” operated on the streets of Detroit. The elite, four- man units developed a reputation among black Detroiters for treating African American residents unfairly and even violently. The police frequently stopped young blacks and demanded to see identification. Often, these stops resulted ver- bal abuse, with the police calling young black men “boy” or “nigger.” While most encounters did not proceed beyond this humiliating verbal abuse, if an African American could not produce proper identification, the stop could result in an arrest or even police violence. In some extreme cases, such police brutality resulted in injury or even death of those detained. For example, in 1962, when a black prosti- tute named Shirley Scott attempted to flee from the back of a patrol car, Detroit police shot her in the back.

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  A Social History of Racial Violence

  • Allen Grimshaw(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Public transportation provides an opportunity to catch isolated in-dividuals and attack them without fear of immediate reprisal. Anotherscene of violence is government buildings, attacks on which have oc-curred when it is believed that Negroes have sought shelter there orbecause Negroes are known to work there. Negro municipal employeeswere evacuated from the City Hall in Detroit when the building wasthreatened by white mobs. Other locations of interracial violence inmajor northern urban race riots have been highly specific. The riotingin Detroit began on the Belle Isle Bridge and became general apparently only after a much publicized announcement at a Negro night club. Thatlocation (Belle Isle) was on the very periphery of the Negro concentra-tion in Detroit and fits none of the ecological classifications of areassuggested above. Once the riot was under way, activity in the originalarea became minimal.

  Elmer R. Akers and Vernon Fox *

  The Detroit Rioters and Looters Committed to Prison

  Race riots have occurred many times in the United States, but the conviction and sentence to prison of a hundred and more of the participants is unprecedented in its volume. On March 9, 1944, we had received in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson 105 of the defendants who had been tried on charges growing out of the Detroit race riot of June 21-22, 1943. Others are still being tried or are awaiting trial.

  Already there have been written several reams concerning the race riot in Detroit. Newspaper and magazine articles, editorials, pamphlets, surveys of opinion, reports of lawyers’ and other associations, and reports by psychiatrists, police commissions, and various city officials have been published. Probably the most important publication has been a small book by Alfred McClung Lee and Norman D. Humphrey of Wayne University (1943). This volume contains a rather objective journalistic report and sociological interpretation of the riot.

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  Incarcerating the Crisis

  Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State

  • Jordan T. Camp(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  In these ways they contributed to the self-organization of an entire community fighting for liberation. 29 urban insurgency in detroit First—let there be no mistake about it—the looting, arson, plunder and pillage which have occurred are not part of the civil rights protest. . . That is crime—and crime must be dealt with forcefully, and swiftly, and certainly. — President Lyndon B. Johnson, address to the nation, July 27, 1967 52 | Chapter Two Political and expressive cultures were perhaps more interwoven in Detroit than in any other North American industrial city. Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown records, was a former autoworker, and many musicians came from Detroit’s Black working-class neighborhoods, including Diana Ross and the Supremes, Florence Ballard, and Mary Milson. Dance halls and nightclubs provided spaces of leisure for industrial workers subjected to backbreaking labor as a workforce. On July 23, 1967, the then-largest insurrection in U.S. history began in a downtown Detroit club. 30 The Detroit rebellion began as city residents witnessed police harass-ment of a homecoming party for two Black soldiers returning from service in the U.S. war in Vietnam. The party occurred at a bar called the United Community and Civil League on Twelfth Street. On July 22, the Detroit police raided a series of so-called blind pigs (after-hours clubs), with the fifth and final raid being the venue that hosted the party. Only a few blocks away from the club, twenty-seven-year-old Army veteran Danny Thomas had recently been murdered by a gang of white youths. Community members were still reeling. While harassment for after-hours drinking was a persistent practice in Detroit, the police usu-ally forced people to disperse and arrested just a few. But that night they arrested all eighty-five people at the party.

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  The Power of the Zoot

  Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II

  • Luis Alvarez(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Race Riots across the United States 217 young and old. 60 Federal officials generally followed the lead of Detroit authorities. U.S. attorney general Francis Biddle suggested that African American migrants in Detroit for war production jobs caused the vio-lence by creating overcrowded and dilapidated living conditions. 61 J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), blamed the bulk of the deaths, injuries, and property destruction on black teenage hoodlums. 62 Black leaders, in contrast, had an altogether different analysis of the riot. When Governor Kelly’s fact-finding com-mittee completed its investigation, the NAACP claimed the report “solves nothing, further embitters Negroes and destroys any lingering vestige of confidence in law enforcement authorities.” 63 Other black spokespeople argued that “the report put the blame for the riot on Negroes, and completely flaunting the charges of police brutality and laxity[,] stated, ‘the ordinary law enforcement and judicial agencies have thus far adequately and properly dealt with law violators.’ ” 64 Citizen groups also began to view the racial violence in Los Angeles, the South, and Detroit as interconnected. National black leadership and the black press often linked the Detroit riot to other race riots in the United States by viewing them all as the product of fifth-column agents seeking to disrupt home-front unity. The National Negro Congress asserted that the riots had collectively weakened numerous war produc-tion centers. According to the NNC, “Detroiter fought Detroiter, and American fought American. . . . Detroit’s vital war production program has lost one million and a quarter man hours.” 65 Noting the attacks against nonwhites across the United States, the NNC further argued that “the Detroit riot was not an isolated incident.

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  Law and Order

  Street Crime, Civil Unrest, and the Crisis of Liberalism in the 1960s

  • Michael W. Flamm(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 .

  The Politics of Civil Unrest

  On July 24, 1967, Detroit was in a state of chaos and the White House was in a state of crisis. One week earlier, the Newark Riot had “put the country near to a psychic flash-point” according to speechwriter Ben Wattenberg, who had joined the staff a year earlier. Now the latest and most serious riot of the decade was escalating out of control.1 Within the administration, officials debated whether Johnson should address the American people in an effort to reassure them. Special Council Harry McPherson opposed the idea since the president would have to assume responsibility for a situation over which he had little or no control. Wattenberg disagreed. “To say that it’s a responsibility without real power to cope with it may be true,” he contended, vision fixed firmly on the 1968 presidential race, “but [it] ignores the fact that Wallace for sure, and probably Nixon and Reagan (and maybe others as well) will ultimately try to stick the blame on the president and the Democrats (as they did in 1964 and 1966)—whether or not any speech is delivered.” Wattenberg was right. The politics of civil unrest was already in full force. That night U.S. Army paratroopers began to patrol the streets of Detroit.2

  During the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967 more than 100 cities experienced riots. The aftermath revealed the depth of the divide between white and black perceptions of what had happened. A Harris Poll in August showed that although most whites and blacks tended to agree that ghetto residents were the main victims of the riots and that new federal programs would reduce the chance of further unrest, they held starkly different views on what had caused the disorders. Twice as many whites as blacks saw the riots as organized. Twice as many blacks as whites, by contrast, blamed the unrest on discrimination, poor housing, and unemployment. Blacks typically (by a 2–1 margin) cited police brutality as a major factor. Whites overwhelmingly (by an 8–1 margin) rejected it.3

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  Racial Situations

  Class Predicaments of Whiteness in Detroit

  • John Hartigan Jr.(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Yet white and black residents in this zone consistently referred only to the riot of 1943 as a racial conflict. Although Laura's version of 1967 was the only strictly RIOTS AND RACE 51 regional interpretation I heard, people stressed to me in their narratives that this particular battle waged during the internal war of the Great Society was not a racial conflict, at least not locally. 63 Since the riot of 1967 is a key event in the white flight narrative, it is surprising that whites in Briggs felt little sense of threat during the days of burning, loot-ing, and the subsequent violent suppression of such activities by the police and National Guard. Whites have for long been terrified by images of armed black insurrection, and this was certainly the general response of whites to the riots of the late 1960s. What differentiated the local inter-pretations and perceptions of this event from those of the majority of whites in Detroit and across the nation? As anthropologists Beth Roy and Ted Swedenberg demonstrate so well, accounts of riots are an intriguing (though never transparent) means for grasping the process of identity constitution across problematic shifts in scale from local to regional or national collectives. 64 The views of the 1967 riot held by whites in Briggs suggest that whiteness is not a simple attribute that they share with whites in other parts of the city and coun-try. If a sense of whiteness-made-vulnerable impelled most whites to leave Detroit because of the riots, the following commonly shared interpreta-tions of these events suggest that the cultural construction of whiteness unevenly and disjointedly incorporates whites. 65 Between the two riots, the contours and contents of whiteness in De-troit were drastically altered, as was the city and the material structures by which social stratification was spatially maintained.

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  The 1960s Cultural Revolution

  Facts and Fictions

  • Joel P. Rhodes(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  7 Urban Riots Were Meaningless, Violent Outbursts What People Think Happened Between July 1964 and May 1968 nearly three hundred American cities experienced some sort of rioting. Over consecutive “long, hot summers,” mounting racial unrest erupted into violence on the streets of predominantly African American urban areas, in places like the Watts neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, Newark’s Central Ward, and Detroit’s West Side. These riots left 7,942 wounded, killed 191, destroyed countless millions of dollars in property, decimated the northern ghettos, and further perplexed Americans already confused by political protest and social upheaval in the Vietnam era. Popular perceptions of urban rioting in the sixties tend to see the racial violence as an aberration, just irrational outbursts by African Americans destroying their own neighborhoods for no real reason and without his- torical precedent. Typically, Americans think of a massive uprising against white people, involving extensive looting, burning, and snipers. Rioters are often described as ghetto “riffraff,” members of a tiny, marginal Black underclass of uneducated, habitual criminals and gang members. Why, many wonder, did these southern-born African Americans who migrated to northern cities after World War II fail to achieve their American dream compared to other ethnic, immigrant groups, such as Italians and Irish earlier in the century? T H E 1 9 6 0 S C U L T U R A L R E V O L U T I O N 150 When considering what “triggered” or “precipitated” rioting, expla- nations vary. Was urban disorder part of an organized leftist conspiracy involving Stokely Carmichael, H.

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  The Selma of the North

  Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee

  • Patrick D. Jones(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  The bans—the restrictions—will be gone.” Yet, the physical and psychic damage had already been done. All told, the civil disturbance in Police–Community Tensions and the 1967 Riot 147 Milwaukee claimed five lives and caused 100 injuries (forty-four of them police), 1,740 arrests (the majority for curfew violations), and $570,000 in property damage. But, perhaps most significant, white Milwaukeeans could no longer comfort themselves with the myth that they were somehow ex-ceptional or different from other large metropolitan areas, that they would somehow escape the worst of the spreading urban crisis. The burning rage had now come home. 12 In the popular telling of the civil rights era, the southern Movement headed north after the historic legislative victories of 1964 and 1965, only to explode in a series of chaotic and violent urban riots, like the one that erupted in Milwaukee. Often, these conflagrations mark the first entrance of the urban North into the postwar civil rights narrative and are usually explained as part of a broader wrong turn for the Movement during the Black Power era, away from the nonviolent, interracial, and reform-minded activism of the first half of the 1960s and toward violence, racial exclusivity, and revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In this light, urban disor-ders appear to be random, nihilistic, irrational, and tragic. There are many problems with this standard trope. First, it obscures the rich history of struggle by African Americans and their allies in northern urban communities well before the urban violence of the mid- and late 1960s and implicates all community members in the violence of a few. In addition, it fails to situate these disturbances within their broader local his-tories of accelerating urban decline, deteriorating police–community rela-tions, and growing popular frustration in black communities with the slow rate of change.

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  "No Equal Justice"

  The Legacy of Civil Rights Icon George W. Crockett Jr.

  • Edward J. Littlejohn, Peter J. Hammer(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Wayne State University Press

    (Publisher)

  If the road was rocky in June, it would get infinitely more so in July with the outbreak of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. Although Crockett was a relatively new and inexperienced judge, he had spent his whole life fighting institutionalized forms of racial violence. By any measure, he was ready for the looming challenge.

  The 1967 Rebellion

  The Rebellion began in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, near the corner of Twelfth and Clairmount Streets in the midst of a mass arrest after police raided an afterhours drinking establishment (a “blind pig”). The violence on the streets and the subsequent response of police and prosecutors resulted in an onslaught on the judicial system with major racial and class overtones. Crockett recalled, “In the Detroit Riots of 1967 a total of 7,200 persons were arrested. Virtually all of these defendants were lower income or indigents. Virtually all were black.”51 The Law Review at the University of Michigan Law School conducted a comprehensive study of judicial practices during the Rebellion. The pressures on the court system were tremendous, challenging the very notion of constitutional due process:

  Apparently, it was commonplace during the disorder for a group of suspects to be “rounded up” and arrested at the same place (often a store which had already been broken into or burned), charged with the same offense (typically, entering without breaking but with intent to commit larceny), brought to a police station for booking, and taken to the court to be arraigned—still as a group—before one judge. Moreover, most of the judges continued the pattern of group treatment by addressing the defendants collectively, rather than as individuals, and by setting identical bails for all. Obviously, the adoption of these procedures precluded any consideration of individual circumstances or of the probability that any particular defendant would return for trial on the appointed day. Bail was set for offenses, not for people.52

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  Ghetto Revolts

  • Peter H. Rossi, Henry Perkinson(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  By now the guilt or innocence of the culprits, and the manner in which the police treat them, are no longer that central. Instead, the focus is on the crowd members’ general feelings that they live in a world in which they are constantly held accountable to standards of justice which are not applied to others. They feel that the merchants with whom they deal cheat them, that employers are either indifferent or exploiting toward them, that the police are disrespectful and suspicious of them. Therefore, they feel that the police (as representatives of the society at large) are perpetrating the greater evil—an evil by comparison with which the minor peccadillos of the drunken driver, traffic violator, the blind-pig patron are, in human terms, irrelevant.

  Further, as incidents like this multiply, and as sophistication about Negro victimization rises in the ghetto community, it becomes increasingly possible to generalize this process without a particular incident. Following the news of the Newark, Detroit, and East Harlem riots in July, a group of Negro teenagers went on a rampage after a rock and roll concert, smashing and looting several of New York’s Fifth Avenue stores. They did not need the provocation of an actual encounter with the police to touch off this vivid rejection of legal authority.

  A riot is a social event which provides different opportunities to different participants. It is a short-lived “opportunity structure.” Of all the aspects of the riot, this is the least well understood. There is no single “rioter,” but rather many kinds of activities, each contributing a little bit to make up the total event. We know almost nothing about who takes each of the possible roles in the rioting—looter, sniper, police attacker, sympathetic bystander, ideological interpreter, and so on. It does seem that the most popular category is that of looter. This makes sense; what the rioters are saying, more than anything else, is “we haven’t gotten our share.” On Detroit’s East and West sides the furniture and appliance stores seemed the hardest hit. “Big ticket” items are the proof of the affluent society and the looters knew exactly where to find them. In this respect the riots become a kind of primitive effort at an income redistribution which the society refuses to support in any lawful and regularized way.

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