The 12th Street Riot was a civil disturbance in Detroit that began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. Vice squad officers executed a raid at a blind pig on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount on the city's near westside. The confrontation with the patrons there evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in modern U.S. history, lasting five days and far surpassing the 1943 riot the city endured. Before the end, the state and federal governments, under order of then President Lyndon B. Johnson, sent in National Guard and U.S. Army troops and the result was forty-three dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings burned down. The scope of the riot was eclipsed in scale only by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Detroit has never fully recovered from the after-effects of the riot and the negative domestic and international media coverage. The riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and an extensive cover stories in Time magazine and Life on August 4, 1967. The Detroit Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage. The event has also been described as a rebellion, rather than a riot.

Background

By all accounts, Detroit was not a blighted city in 1967. However, the city was dealing with issues of white flight, job loss due to automation, and corresponding tax revenue loss, as well as the social ills of the period. Some key factors are often cited as contributing factors leading up to the 1967 riots:

History of racial strife

The seeds of the 12th Street riot were planted in the extraordinary growth of the auto industry that placed the city at the industrial center of the nation. The availability of high-paying and unskilled work in auto plants attracted many from the south, both black and white, who brought their often conflicting cultures into the community. In 1943, racial tensions between blacks and whites broke out into open riot as each competed for wartime jobs and limited housing in the 1943 Detroit riot.

Housing

By 1967, black residents lacked adequate housing due to lending practices, misguided urban renewal, and deed restrictions.^[1] Blacks were trapped and confined to areas (often undesirable) that were not sufficient to hold the displaced population, and by 1967, the neighborhood around 12th Street had a population density that was twice the city average. Black schools in the city were overcrowded as well as underfunded. After the riot, respondents to a Detroit Free Press poll listed poor housing as the second most important issue leading up to the riot, right behind police brutality.^[2]

Detroit had the highest home ownership rate among black people in the nation, but urban renewal projects bulldozed some black neighborhoods to make way for freeway construction. In order to construct Interstate 75, "Black Bottom" (Paradise Valley) was demolished, displacing most residents to high-rise low-income project housing or already-crowded neighborhoods. Black Bottom was the focus of the black community, and its loss resulted in racial tensions due to the loss of community as well as housing.^[3]

Lending practices by banks, such as redlining, in addition to deed restrictions in local communities, denied blacks the ability to move to many neighborhoods, including most of the Detroit suburbs.

Many homes that were privately owned were bought on land contract at high interest rates and very short foreclosure schedules.

Economic decline

Due to a number of factors, including increased productivity and automation, consolidation of the auto industry, the end of World War II, taxation, and a need for room, Detroit lost 134,000 jobs from 1947 to 1963.^[4] Detroit lost over 100,000 manufacturing jobs in the 1950's, as companies like Packard, Hudson, and Studebaker as well as hundreds of smaller companies went out of business. In the 1950's the unemployment rate hovered near 10 percent -- double the national average.^[5] Between 1946 and 1956, GM spent $3.4 billion on new plants, Ford $2.5 billion, Chrysler $700 million, opening a total of 25 auto plants, all in Detroit's suburbs.

As a result, many left Detroit for jobs in the suburbs. Most who left were white, leaving for new jobs, better housing, better city services and schools in suburbs like Ferndale and Rochester Hills. In the 1967, in spite of black immigration from the southern USA, Detroit was losing over 20,000 residents a year (net).^[6] Indeed, Detroit's population fell by 140,000 between 1950 and 1960, ^[7] and another 100,000 residents by 1970^[8] While whites could escape the problems of Detroit, blacks were denied loans and, in some cases, purchases in the suburbs due to lending and deed restrictions.

Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a New Deal liberal Democrat, was elected less than two years prior to the riot with promises of progressive reforms and an end to the cronyism that had marked his predecessor's tenure. The federal government, at Cavanagh's prodding, pumped money into the city's urban renewal and Head Start programs. However, those areas that Cavanagh had designated for rehabilitation actually saw poverty rise between 1961 and 1967.^[9]

Unemployment among black men was more than double that of white men in Detroit at the time of the riot -- 15.9 percent of blacks were unemployed, but only 6 percent of whites were unemployed in the 1950's -- largely due to the seniority system of the unionized factories. In addition, blacks were often less educated than whites, and when they did have the same education, they were generally paid less than their white counterparts.^[10]

Police brutality

In 1967, the Detroit Police Department was predominantly white; only 5% of the force was black. Prior efforts by Mayor Cavanaugh to improve these numbers, plus efforts to establish a civilian police review board, were met with hostility by the police force. In one such protest in the spring of 1967, police increased arrests for petty offenses, which was widely seen as harassment by the black residents of Detroit.^[11].

The Detroit police used Big 4 or Tac Squads, each made up of four police officers, to patrol Detroit neighborhoods. They had a reputation among the black residents of Detroit for harassment and brutality. Officers verbally degraded youths, and those that could not produce proper identification were often arrested or worse. Several questionable shootings and beatings of blacks by officers were reported by the local press in the years before 1967.^[12]

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.^[13]

National racial tensions

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Detroit for a march to protest segregation and racism. In his speech, he said prophetically, "...We must come to see that de facto segregation in the North is just as injurious as the actual segregation in the South."^[14]

Beginning in 1964, with the Rochester 1964 race riot, the nation witnessed numerous riots in major cities.

By 1967, the mainstream civil rights movement was in decline, making space for the emerging, high-profile Black Power Movement and its more militant approach to combating racism and increasing the life chances of black people.

Twelve days before the raid on the blind pig, Newark, New Jersey suffered through six days of rioting, ending less than five days before the beginning of the Detroit riot. Conditions in Newark were much worse for blacks than conditions were in Detroit. Detroit's rate of black homeownership was the highest in the nation; Newark's was much lower.

Chronology

In the early hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers expected to find only two individuals in the blind pig, but instead there were 82 people celebrating the return of two local veterans from the war in Vietnam. Despite the large number, police decided to arrest everyone present. A crowd soon gathered around the establishment, protesting as patrons were led away.

After the last police car left, a group of angry black males, who had observed the incident, began breaking the windows of the adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale rioting began throughout the neighborhood, which continued into Monday, July 24, 1967, and for the next few days. Despite a conscious effort by the local news media to avoid reporting on it so as not to inspire copy-cat violence, the mayhem expanded to other parts of the city with theft and destruction beyond the 12th Street/Clairmount Avenue vicinity.

Michigan Governor George Romney and President Lyndon Johnson initially disagreed about the legality of sending in federal troops. Johnson said he could not send federal troops in without Romney declaring a "state of insurrection". Romney was reluctant to make that declaration for fear that doing so would relieve insurance companies of their obligations to reimburse policyholders for the damage being done.

The violence escalated throughout Monday, July 24, resulting in some 483 fires, 231 incidents reported per hour, and 1800 arrests. Looting and arson were widespread. Rioters took shots at firefighters who were attempting to fight the fires, possibly with some with the 2,498 rifles and 38 handguns that were stolen from local stores. It was obvious that the Detroit and Michigan forces were unable to keep the peace.

On Monday, U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan), who was against Federal troop deployment, attempted to ease tensions but was unsuccessful, and left under a shower of bricks.^[15]

Reportedly, Conyers stood on the hood of the car and shouted through a bullhorn, "We're with you! But, please! This is not the way to do things! Please go back to your homes!" But the crowd refused to listen. One civil rights activist (whom Conyers had once defended in a trial) allegedly responded, "Why are you defending the cops and the establishment? You're just as bad as they are!" Conyers' car was pelted with rocks and bottles, one of them hitting a nearby policeman. According to reports, as Conyers climbed down from the hood of the car, he remarked to a reporter in disgust, "You try to talk to those people and they'll knock you into the middle of next year."^[16]

Likewise, Detroit Tigers left-fielder Willie Horton, a black Detroit resident who grew up not far from the blind pig, drove to the riot area after his game and stood on a car in the middle of the crowd while he was still wearing his uniform. However, despite his impassioned pleas, he could not calm the angry mob. ^[17]

Shortly before midnight on Monday, July 24, President Johnson authorized use of Federal troops by using a law from 1795, which stated that the President may call in armed forces whenever there is an insurrection in any state against the government.^[18] The 82nd Airborne had earlier been positioned at nearby Selfridge Air Force Base in suburbanMacomb County, along with National Guard troops who were federalized at that time. Starting at 1:30 AM Tuesday July 25, some 8,000 National Guardsmen were deployed to quell the disorder. Later their number would be augmented with 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, and 360 Michigan State Police.

There is some discussion that the deployment of troops incited more violence, although the riot ended within 48 hours of their deployment. The discussion might hinge on the type of troop used in various locations. Most of the Michigan National Guard were white, while many of the Federal Army troops were black. National Guard troops were engaged in firefights with locals, resulting in deaths both to locals and the troops. Of the 12 people shot and killed by troops, only one was by a Federal soldier, possibly because the Federal troops were ordered not to unload their guns except under the direct order of an officer.^[19] Indeed, the actions of the National Guard troops were called into question in the Cyrus Vance report.^[20]

Tanks and machine guns were used in the effort to keep the peace. Film footage and photos shown internationally of a city on fire, with tanks and combat troops in firefights in the streets, sealed Detroit's reputation for decades to come.

By Thursday, July 27, order had returned to the city to the point where ammunition was taken from the National Guardsmen stationed in the riot area, and bayonets ordered sheathed. Troop withdrawal began on Friday, July 28, the day of the last major fire in the riot. The Army troops were completely withdrawn by Saturday, July 29.

The Detroit riot ignited similar problems elsewhere. National Guardsmen or state police were deployed in five other cities: Pontiac, Flint, Saginaw, Grand Rapids, and Toledo, Ohio. Disturbances were also reported in more than two dozen cities.

The toll

Over the period of five days, forty-three people died, of whom 33 were black. The other damages were calculated as follows:

• 467 injured: 182 civilians, 167 Detroit police officers, 83 Detroit firefighters, 17 National Guard troops, 16 State Police officers, 3 U.S. Army soldiers.
• 7,231 arrested: 6,528 adults, 703 juveniles; 6,407 blacks, 824 whites. The youngest, 4; the oldest, 82. Half of those arrested had no criminal record. Three percent of those arrested went to trial; half of them were acquitted.
• 2,509 stores looted or burned, 388 families homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burned or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from arson and looting ranged from $40 million to $80 million.^[21]

The dead included:

Name	Race	Age	Date	Comment
Krikor “George” Messerlian	white	68	7/27/67	Killed while defending his shoe repair shop.
Willie Hunter	black	26	7/23/67	Found in the basement of Brown's Drug store, believed to have been asphyxiated while store burned down.
Prince Williams	black	32	7/23/67	Also found in the basement of Brown's Drug store asphyxiated.
Sheren George	black	23	7/24/67	Shot while riding in the front seat of a car driven by her husband.
Julius Dorsey	black	55	7/25/67	Worked as a security guard and was shot by a National Guardsman under questionable circumstances.
Clifton Pryor	white	23	7/24/67	Mistaken for a sniper and shot by a National Guardsman.
John Ashby	white	26	8/4/67	Firefighter with the Detroit Fire Department; was electrocuted by a high-tension wire that had fallen.
Herman Ector	black	30	7/24/67	Shot with a rifle by security guard Waverly Solomon, while intervening in a dispute between a group of youths.
Fred Williams	black	49	7/24/67	Killed by stepping on a downed power line.
Daniel Jennings	black	36	7/24/67	Broke into Stanley’s Patent Medicine and Package Store and was shot by the owner, Stanley Meszezenski
Robert Beal	black	49	7/24/67	Shot by a Detroit police officer at a burned out auto parts store.
Joseph Chandler	black	34	7/24/67	Shot by police while engaged in looting at the Food Time Market.
Herman Canty	black	46	7/24/67	Observed loading merchandise from the rear door of the Bi-Lo Supermarket. Police fired several rounds at the truck until it stopped, and they found Canty dead inside.
Alfred Peachlum	black	35	7/24/67	As A&P supermarket was being looted, Peachlum was inside with a shiny object in his hand. Police opened fire. The object turned out to be a piece of meat wrapped in shiny paper.
Alphonso Smith	black	35	7/24/67	The police version was that Smith and four other men were cornered while looting the Standard Food Market. Other sources state that an officer fired through a window.
Nathaniel Edmonds	black	23	7/24/67	Richard Shugar, a 24-year-old white male, accused Edmonds of breaking into his store, and he shot Edmonds in the chest with a shotgun. Shugar was charged with first-degree murder.
Charles Kemp	black	35	7/24/67	Took five packs of cigars and was observed removing a cash register from Borgi’s Market. He ran, police officers gave chase, and shots were fired.
Richard Sims	black	35	7/24/67	Shot after he attempted to break into the Hobby Bar.
John Leroy	black	30	7/24/67	A passenger in a vehicle which National Guard and police opened fire upon. Police stated that the vehicle was trying to break through a roadblock.
Carl Smith	white	30	7/25/67	While attempting to organize firefighter units, gunshots were fired. At the end, Smith was lying dead.
Emanuel Cosby	black	26	7/25/67	Broke into N&T Market; police arrived just as he was making his escape. Cosby ran and was shot while running away with the loot.
Henry Denson	black	27	7/25/67	Passenger in a car with two other black males which came upon a roadblock erected by National Guardsmen; the vehicle was fired upon for trying to break the roadblock.
Jerome Olshove	white	27	7/25/67	The only policeman killed in the riot. Olshove was shot in scuffle outside an A&P supermarket.
William Jones	black	28	7/25/67	Broke into a liquor store, was caught and attempted escape. Police orders were given to halt, but he continued to run and the officers opened fire.
Ronald Evans	black	24	7/25/67	Shot with William Jones in liquor store looting.
Roy Banks	black	46	7/27/67	Banks was a deaf mute and was walking along the street when he was shot by Guardsmen who mistook him for an escaping looter.
Frank Tanner	black	19	7/25/67	Broke into a store with his friends and was shot while making an escape from a National Guardsman.
Arthur Johnson	black	36	7/25/67	Shot inside looted pawn shop.
Perry Williams	black	36	7/25/67	Shot with Johnson inside pawn shop.
Jack Sydnor	black	38	7/25/67	Shot a policeman investigating a potential sniper. In response, police fired a barrage of bullets into in the apartment.
Tanya Blanding	black	4	7/26/67	Died as a result of a gunfire from a National Guard tank stationed in front of her house. Guardsmen stated that they were responding to sniper fire from the second floor.
William N Dalton	black	19	7/26/67	Police report stated that he was an arsonist and was attempting to flee from the police.
Helen Hall	white	51	7/26/67	Hall, a native of Illinois, was visiting Detroit on business. The police report states that she was shot by a sniper while staying at the Harlan House Motel.
Larry Post	white	26	7/26/67	After an exchange with a car with three white men, Post was found with a gunshot wound to the stomach. Post was a Sergeant in the National Guard.
Aubrey Pollard	black	19	7/26/67	Killed after a group of policemen and National Guardsmen stormed the Algiers Motel in search of snipers.
Carl Cooper	black	17	7/26/67	Killed with Pollard at the Algiers Motel.
Fred Temple	black	18	7/26/67	Also killed in the Algiers Motel.
George Tolbert	black	20	7/26/67	Killed as he ran past a National Guard checkpoint at Dunedin and LaSalle Streets, when a bullet fired by a Guardsman hit him.
Julius Lawrence Lust	white	26	7/26/67	Lust and his friends decided to steal a car part from a junkyard and continued to run despite being told to stop by police.
Albert Robinson	black	38	7/26/67	The police report stated the guardsmen came under fire from snipers and returned fire. At the end of the exchange, Robinson was dead.
Ernest Roquemore	black	19	7/28/67	Hit in the back by an Army paratrooper and declared dead on arrival at Detroit General Hospital.

Contrary to popular belief, black-owned businesses were not spared. One of the first stores looted in Detroit was Hardy's drug store, owned by blacks, and known for filling prescriptions on credit. Detroit's leading black-owned clothing store was burned, as was one of the city's best-loved black restaurants. In the wake of the riots, a black merchant noted "you were going to get looted no matter what color you were."^[22]

Beyond the immediate destruction of a considerable section of the city, the disturbances are thought to have accelerated white flight (and also middle-class black flight) to the surrounding suburbs and led to an increased fear of the city among many suburbanites which continues to this day. While the city of Detroit still had a white majority in 1967, it would gain a black majority by the early 1970s. Furthermore, Detroit's overall population within the city limits (today more than 80% black) has been sliced in half within the space of five decades. In the 1950 census, there were more than 1,800,000 residents within the city limits, more than three-fourths of whom were white. By the 2000 census, however, there were only about 950,000 city residents—the first time since the 1910 census that Detroit had officially recorded fewer than a million inhabitants—and whites made up less than 15% of the population. As conditions have deteriorated in the city—notably in the performance of its public school system and in its (at times) notoriously high crime rate&mdash although the city is seeing improvments and rebirth;some of the city's suburbs have become predominantly black, such as Southfield in neighboring Oakland County which is a mostly affluent white population county. Many observers trace the dramatically quickened pace of these developments to the 1967 unrest and to public school desegregation orders by federal courts in the early 1970s.

The aftermath

An estimated 10,000 participated, with an estimated 100,000 gathering to watch. Thirty-six hours of rioting later, 43 were dead, 33 of them black, 17 of those by police action. More than 7,200 were arrested, mostly black.

Detroit's mayor at the time, Jerome Cavanagh, lamented upon surveying the damage, "Today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough."^[23]

Reflecting on the riots, Coleman Young, Detroit's first black mayor, who took office in 1974, wrote:

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 rebellion, totally 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.[24]

Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot commented on the rioting in his song "Black Day in July". John Lee Hooker wrote "The Motor City is Burning" based on the 1943 Detroit riots, adapted to the 67 riots by Detroit's MC5. The riots are also featured prominently in Middlesex, a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides that took place in Grosse Pointe. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003.

12th Street was renamed "Rosa Parks Boulevard" in 1976, but is still referred to as 12th by residents of the city.

See also

• The Algiers Motel Incident
• List of riots related to urban decay

Notes

External links

• Website about riots with victims list and survivor stories
• Aerial photograph from TerraServer of the corner of Rosa Parks Blvd. and Clairmount St.
• Report of federal activities during the Detroit riots by Cyrus R. Vance
• CBC Archives: Gordon Lightfoot's "Black Day in July" banned