1967 Race Riots: The Rioting
Meanwhile, witnesses described seeing a "carnival atmosphere" on 12th Street. Police being vastly outnumbered by the protesters was ill equipped to quell the rioting and wrongly believed that the rioting would be short lived. Police did not make their first arrest until 7 a.m. . To the east, on Chene Street, reports suggested that the rioters of a mixed composition ranging from African Americans to whites who favored a more just system for African Americans. The pastor of Grace Episcopal Church along 12th Street reported that he saw a "gleefulness in throwing stuff and getting stuff out of buildings" The police conducted several search operations along 12th Street, which turned out to be quite futile because of the unexpectedly large amounts of people rioting on the streets. The first major fire broke mid-afternoon in a grocery store at the corner of 12th Street and Atkinson. The mob prevented firefighters from extinguishing it and soon more smoke filled the skyline.
The local news media initially avoided reporting on the disturbance so as not to inspire copy-cat violence, but the rioting started to expand to other parts of the city, including looting of retail and grocery stores elsewhere. By Sunday afternoon, news had spread, and people attending events such as a Fox Theater Motown revue and Detroit Tigers baseball game were warned to avoid certain areas of the city. Motown's Martha Reeves was on stage at the Fox, singing "Jimmy Mack," and was assigned to ask people to leave quietly, as there was trouble outside. After the game, Tigers left fielder Willie Horton, a black 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 mob. Vertical Divider
This was not the first time that the city had to withstand such rioting of a large scale. Such events had also taken place in 1943. The rioting had came as a direct result of disparity between the African American and the White populations, in terms of income distribution and various other social assets. Alex Swan in her article THE HARLEM AND DETROIT RIOTS OF 1943: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS discusses how the society was ignorant of the problems concerning the African American population, with the thought that riots of such kind were rare and were likely to happen again. This suggests that the conditions in 1960s shared significant similarities to the issues prevailing in the 1940s. The rioting could have been prevented if the city administration had taken steps to prevent the maladies of Detroit persist and get worse.
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In the morning hours of Sunday July 23, 1967, police officers of the Detroit Police Department raided the after hours drinking club located at 9125 12th Street. They expected only a small number of patrons inside, but instead found a large group of 82 black people celebrating the return of two local GIs from the Vietnam War. The police arrested everyone present. While the prisoners were awaiting transportation, a sizable crowd of onlookers gathered on the street. Later, in a memoir, Walter Scott III, a doorman whose father was running the raided blind pig, took responsibility for starting the riot by inciting the crowd and throwing a bottle at a police officer.
After the police had left the scene, large groups of African American rioters started to gather and protest the capture of the patrons of the bar. Shortly thereafter, full fledged looting began throughout the neighborhood and also started to spread to other neighborhoods. State police, Wayne County sheriffs, and the Michigan National Guard were put on high alert, but because it was Sunday, it took hours for the Police Commissioner Ray Girardin to assemble sufficient manpower. These circumstances led to the worsening of the already unstable relations between the police and the black community. According to a news report written in 1992. The author asserts that the main reason for the mass rioting was the lack of proper representation for the black community, which resulted in an explosion of sentiments. Soon the local police force was overwhelmed by the rioters as its resources and manpower was stretched across the city. The police officials together with the city leadership decided to get the army and the national guard involved. As a result the 82nd and the 101st airborne divisions were deployed to uphold the law and order situation of Detroit.
Some observers believed that the conflict was escalated with the deployment of troops. Order was restored within 48 hours with the help of the armed forces. Nearly all of the Michigan National Guard were exclusively white, inexperienced militarily, and did not have urban backgrounds, while the Army troops were racially integrated and had seen service in Vietnam. As a result, the Army troops were at ease and able to function with relative ease in the city while the National Guardsmen were likely afraid of being in the city at all, much less being outnumbered racially when deployed to the inner city. The National Guardsmen engaged in what they said were firefights with locals, resulting in the death of one Guardsman. Of the 12 people that troops shot and killed, only one was shot by a federal soldier. Army troops were ordered not to load their weapons except under the direct order of an officer. The Cyrus Vance report made afterward criticized the actions of the National Guardsmen, who shot and killed eleven civilians. By Thursday, July 27, sufficient order had returned to the city that officers withdrew ammunition from the National Guardsmen stationed in the riot area and ordered them to sheath their bayonets. 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. |