The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street Riot, was the bloodiest of the urban riots in the United States during the "long, hot summer of 1967". Composed mainly of confrontations between African American residents and the Detroit Police Department, it began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, in Detroit.
The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar, known as a blind pig, on the city's Near West Side. It exploded into one of the deadliest and most destructive social insurgences in American history, lasting five days and surpassing the scale of Detroit's 1943 race riot 24 years earlier.
Governor George W. Romney ordered the Michigan Army National Guard into Detroit to help end the disturbance. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the United States Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The riot resulted in 43 deaths, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 400 buildings destroyed.
The scale of the riot was the worst in the United States since the 1863 New York City draft riots during the American Civil War, and it was not surpassed until the 1992 Los Angeles riots 25 years later.
The riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and extensive stories in Time and Life magazines. The staff of the Detroit Free Press won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting for its coverage.
Background
Racial segregation
In the early 20th century, when African Americans migrated to Detroit in the Great Migration, the city experienced a rapidly increasing population and a shortage of housing. African Americans encountered strong discrimination in housing. Both racial covenants and unspoken agreements among whites kept black people out of certain neighborhoods and prevented most African Americans from buying their own homes. The presence of Ku Klux Klan members throughout Michigan furthered racial tensions and violence. Malcolm X's father, Earl Little, was killed in a streetcar accident in 1931, albeit X stated in his autobiography that he believed the Black Legion, a more radical breakaway of the Klan, in East Lansing was involved. In addition, a system of redlining was instituted, which made it nearly impossible for black Detroiters to purchase a home in most areas of the city, effectively locking black residents into lower-quality neighborhoods. These discriminatory practices and the effects of the segregation that resulted from them contributed significantly to the racial tensions in the city before the riot. Segregation also encouraged harsher policing in African American neighborhoods, which escalated Black Detroiters' frustrations leading up to the riot.
Patterns of racial and ethnic segregation persisted through the mid-20th century. In 1956, mayor Orville Hubbard of Dearborn, part of Metro Detroit, boasted to the Montgomery Advertiser that "Negroes can't get in here...These people are so anti-colored, much more than you in Alabama."
The election of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 brought some reform to the police department, led by new Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards. Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through President Johnson's Great Society programs and invested them almost exclusively in Black neighborhoods, where poverty and social problems were concentrated at the time. By the 1960s, many Black people had advanced into better union and professional jobs. The city had a prosperous Black middle class; higher-than-normal wages for unskilled Black workers due to the success of the auto industry; two black Congressmen (half of the Black Congressmen at the time); three Black judges; two black members on the Detroit Board of Education; a housing commission that was forty percent Black; and twelve Black representatives representing Detroit in the Michigan legislature. The city had historic Black neighborhoods such as Conant Gardens. In May 1967, the federal administration ranked housing for the Black community in Detroit above that of Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Cleveland. Nicholas Hood, the sole Black member of the nine-member Detroit Common Council, praised the Cavanagh administration for its willingness to listen to concerns of the inner city. Weeks prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh had said that residents did not "need to throw a brick to communicate with City Hall."
There were still signs of Black disaffection, however; In 1964, Rosa Parks, who had moved to Detroit in the late fifties, told an interviewer: "I don't feel a great deal of difference here [from Alabama]...Housing segregation is just as bad, and it seems more noticeable in the larger cities." The improvements mostly benefited wealthier black Detroiters, and low income Black Detroiters remained frustrated by the social conditions in Detroit. Despite the modest improvements described above, segregation, police brutality and racial tension were rampant in 1960s Detroit and played a large role in inciting the riot.
Policing issues
The Detroit Police Department was directly administered by the Mayor. Prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh's appointees, George Edwards and Ray Girardin, worked for reform. Edwards tried to recruit and promote Black police officers, but he refused to establish a civilian police review board, as African Americans had requested. During the trial to discipline police officers who were accused of resorting to brutality, he turned the police department's rank-and-file against him. Many whites believe that his policies were "too soft on crime". In 1965, the Community Relations Division of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission undertook a study of the police, published in 1968. It claimed that the "police system" was at fault for racism. The police department was accused of recruiting "bigots" and it was also accused of reinforcing bigotry through its "value system". According to the results of a survey which was conducted by President Johnson's Kerner Commission, prior to the riot, 45 percent of the police officers who were working in Black neighborhoods were "extremely anti-Negro" and an additional 34 percent were "prejudiced".
In 1967, 93% of the force was still white, although 30% of city residents were Black. Incidents of police brutality caused Black residents to feel unsafe. They resented many police officers who they felt talked down to them, addressing men as "boys" and addressing women as "honey" and "baby." Police conducted street searches on groups of young men, and single women complained about being called prostitutes for simply walking on the street. The police frequently arrested people who did not have proper identification. The local press reported several questionable shootings and beatings of Black citizens by officers in the years before 1967. After the riot, a Detroit Free Press survey showed that residents reported police brutality as the number one problem they faced in the period leading up to the riot.
Black residents complained by stating that the police did not respond to their calls as quickly as they responded to the calls which were made by white residents. They believed that the police force profited from vice and other crimes which were committed in Black neighborhoods, and the press's accusations that the police force was corrupt and linked to organized crime weakened their trust in the police force. According to Sidney Fine, "the biggest complaint about vice in the ghetto was prostitution." The Black community's leadership thought that the police did not do enough to curb white johns from exploiting Black women. In the weeks leading up to the riot, police had started to work to curb prostitution along Twelfth Street. On July 1, a prostitute was killed, and rumors spread that the police had shot her. The police said that she was murdered by local pimps. Detroit police used Big 4 or Tac squads, each made up of four police officers, to patrol Detroit neighborhoods, and such squads were used to combat soliciting.
Black residents felt that police raids on after-hours drinking clubs were racially biased actions. Since the 1920s, such clubs had become important parts of Detroit's social life for Black residents; although they were established during Prohibition, they continued to exist because Black people were not served in many Detroit bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues.
Employment and unemployment
In the postwar period, the city had lost nearly 150,000 jobs to the suburbs with white flight taking shape at the time. Contributing factors were a combination of changes in technology, increased automation, consolidation of the auto industry, taxation policies, the need for different kinds of manufacturing space, and the construction of the highway system that eased transportation. Major companies like Packard, Hudson, and Studebaker, as well as hundreds of smaller companies, went out of business. In the 1950s, the unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent. Between 1946 and 1956, GM spent $3.4 billion on new plants, Ford $2.5 billion, and Chrysler $700 million, opening a total of 25 auto plants, all in Detroit's suburbs. As a result, workers who could do so left Detroit for jobs in the suburbs. Other middle-class residents left the city for newer housing, in a pattern repeated nationwide. In the 1960s, the city lost about 10,000 residents per year to the suburbs. Detroit's population fell by 179,000 between 1950 and 1960, and by another 156,000 residents by 1970, which affected all its retail businesses and city services.
By the time of the riot, unemployment among Black men was more than double that among white men in Detroit. In the 1950s, 15.9 percent of black people were unemployed, but only 6 percent of white people were unemployed. This was partially due to the union seniority system of the factories. Except for Ford, which hired a significant number of Black workers for their factories, the other automakers did not hire Black workers until World War II resulted in a labor shortage. With lower seniority, black workers were the first to be laid off in job cutbacks after the war. Moreover, Black labor was "ghettoized" into the "most arduous, dangerous and unhealthy jobs."
When the auto industry boomed again in the early 1960s, only Chrysler and the Cadillac Division of General Motors assembled vehicles in the city of Detroit. The Black workers they hired got "the worst and most dangerous jobs: the foundry and the body shop."
A prosperous, Black educated class had developed in traditional professions such as social work, ministry, medicine, and nursing. Many other Black citizens working outside manufacturing were relegated to service industries as waiters, porters, or janitors. Many Black women were limited to work in domestic service. Certain business sectors were known to discriminate against hiring Black workers, even at entry-level positions. It took picketing by Arthur Johnson and the Detroit chapter of the NAACP before First Federal Bank hired their first black tellers and clerks.
Housing developments and discrimination
Housing in Detroit had been a major problem due to the industrial boom that started in the early 20th century. Several urban renewal projects after World War II, intended to improve housing, dramatically changed neighborhood boundaries and ethnic composition. Affordability for industrial workers and the sheer number of new people in the city resulted in a housing shortage, ultimately fostering the need to establish federal loan systems and invest in public housing, especially for minority populations. Detroit undertook a series of urban renewal projects that disproportionately affected Black people, who occupied some of the oldest housing.
Racial discrimination in housing was federally enforced by redlining and restrictive covenants in the mid-20th century. They played an important role in segregating Detroit and escalating racial tensions in the city. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation was in charge of assigning ratings of "A" (green) through "D" (red) to all of the neighborhoods in major U.S. cities based on the conditions of the buildings, the infrastructure and most importantly, the racial composition of the area. Residents of a neighborhood with a "C" or "D" rating struggled to get loans, and almost all neighborhoods with any African American population were rated "D", effectively segregating the city by race. This effectively limited options for African Americans to purchase houses outside of these areas, or acquire resources to repair their already damaged homes in these areas. In fact, only 0.8% of all new construction in the city was available to African Americans. Black Bottom and Paradise Valley (located on Detroit's lower east side, south of Gratiot) were examples of African-American neighborhoods that formed as a result of these government restrictions.