DETROIT – On July 23, 1967, an early-morning police raid of an after-hours club on 12th Street & Clairmount set off what was, at the time, the most destructive American riot of the 20th Century. Today, 45 years later, the 1967 Riots are seen as more than four days of destruction and mayhem; it became the seminal moment of the last half-century for Detroit.
“Riots and rebellions aren’t things that are planned,” said Dr. Melba Joyce Boyd, distinguished professor and chair of Africana Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. “It’s an accumulated outburst or reaction to ongoing repression”
By the summer of 1967, amid race riots in other major cities across the country, the tensions between the city’s black residents and then-majority white Detroit Police Department had reached a fever pitch. Racial intimidation, harassment, and police brutality were commonplace and by 4 a.m. on July 23, the powder keg exploded.
“The riot was a direct response to police repression,” Dr. Boyd said. “Black people had very little political power, or influence, over their lives in the city even though we comprised a substantial percentage of the population.”
The riot – or “rebellion” as older Detroiters often call it – was the city’s second in 25 years and the most destructive riot in U.S. history (it was surpassed by the 1992 Los Angeles riots). By the time it ended on July 27, 45 people were dead, 467 were injured, 2,500 businesses were destroyed, 388 families were left homeless and 412 buildings burned or damaged – some of which still stand today.
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Jerome Cavanaugh was in his second term as Detroit’s mayor in 1967. Cavanaugh, who ironically was elected in 1961 due to massive support from African-Americans who were fed up with police brutality, was heavily criticized for his handling of the riots.
“There were smaller riots around the country, and it seemed that Detroit had dodged the bullet by 1967,” said Phil Cavanaugh, Jerome Cavanaugh’s son and a current state representative. “You can diffuse a situation if you act quickly. This was a blind pig and it took a long time for the paddy wagon to get there to cart people away and crowds assembled.”
Cavanaugh, who passed away in 1979, came under heavy criticism for what was seen as a lax response to the riot. The criticism included the attempted black out of local media coverage during the riot’s first day and the delay in getting help from the National Guard from Governor George Romney.
“Once the incident did precipitate, I think politics kind of took over,” Cavanaugh, a former Wayne County Commissioner, said. “Romney had his eye on the White House. You have Republican versus Democrat [President Lyndon Johnson] with an election the following year.
“My father said that he wanted the National Guard to come in quickly, diffuse it, and be done. Johnson wasn’t going to [send in guard troops] until Romney asked for them to make him show a sign of weakness.”
While the immediate impact was devastating to the city, it was the lingering aftermath that redefined it. A long-standing misconception is that the riot caused the “white flight” from the city, which eventually saw revenue and businesses follow, but this was not the case.
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“There were still ethnically linked neighborhoods in the city for years afterwards,” Dr. Boyd said. “You don’t see that mass white flight out of the city until the election of Coleman A. Young [in 1973]. For the most part, there was still white control over the city after the riots and white people were not leaving en masse until after there was significant black political control.”
Since Young took over as mayor on Jan. 1, 1974, Detroit has had five mayors – all have been black. Today, nearly 90 percent of the city’s residents are black. A majority of the Detroit City Council has been black since 1980 and the city’s population has plummeted from 1.4 million to 713,000 in that time period.
“When people come to Detroit, they’re always mystified by the peculiar apartheid that is way above board here,” said Desiree Cooper, a former columnist for the Detroit Free Press and owner of a Detroit-based clothing company called Detroit Snob. She moved to Detroit from Virginia in 1982.
“In other towns it might be a subtext, it might be a subtlety, or it might be more masked by economics. But in Detroit, it’s just right out there that the city is black, the suburbs are white for the most part, and never the two shall meet. There is a hostility and whose side you’re on is very much determined by your neighborhood and a lot of people are really stunned by that.”
At no point was the antipathy between the city and suburbs higher than during Young’s 20-year tenure. Often at odds with suburban leaders and residents, the angry rhetoric from both sides often fueled the “us versus them” mentality and created an atmosphere where paranoia of the suburbs wresting control of the city took hold.
“I didn’t know of any other city in the nation where there’s such a pre-occupation in the suburbs for control,” Young once told the Detroit Free Press. “The same people who left the city for racial reasons still want to control what they left.”
That narrative still holds true amongst some Detroit residents and even some current members of city government. Accusations are known to fly during political campaigns in Detroit that one candidate is going to “give the city away” to suburbanites.
“I feel that the riots were instrumental in cementing that mentality and we have yet to outgrow it,” Cooper said. “It was there before the riots. But (the riots) are where it came above board, and people realized that Detroit was going to be left to the black people.”
Detroit’s fate after the riots differs greatly from other cities that dealt with similar disturbances. Los Angeles, which dealt with the 1965 Watts riots, did not suffer the same economic and societal fate that Detroit did.
“I think in Detroit, more than any other city that I’ve seen, the white establishment picked up their toys and left,” Cooper said. “In Watts, for example, the city didn’t suffer because the white political structure didn’t leave Los Angeles. They just divested in Watts.
“In other ‘black’ cities, the white power structure never picked up and left. That is truly the difference. It wasn’t just the neighborhood, or the 12th Street area that suffered, Detroit in total paid the price.”
In recent years, the city has seen another freefall. What was a recession for many places around the country was a depression for Detroit. Younger Detroit residents – those who grew up in the city during the 1980s and 90s – have seen 1967 used as a political crutch for years and have started to grow tired of excuses.
Tameria Warren, 32, grew up on the city’s east side and currently works for the Army in South Carolina. Warren is apart of a growing number of Detroit natives and residents who have grown tired of the riots being used as an excuse for the city’s current state.
“The destruction during the riot itself, the loss of vital businesses, and the economic disinvestment had a snowball effect and we’re just now starting to address it,” Warren said. “The current state of Detroit has been a collective effort of resistance, resentment, bias, pride, racism – the whole nine yards. It’s going to take a mix of people who truly love the city, no matter who they are, to restore it.”
Phil Cavanaugh, who was just 6 years old in 1967, is dealing with changes in the district he represents. He currently represents the 17th district, which includes Redford Township, a small suburb north of Detroit. He is running for a seat in the newly formed 10th district, which now includes parts of Detroit.
“We do need Detroit,” Cavanaugh said. “The new district is Redford and northwest Detroit. I’ve never represented Detroit, and I’m starting to knock on doors … and I say ‘my dad was Mayor of Detroit’ and people say ‘Wow, really?’ I’m not saying that everybody loved him but people do remember better times.”
Some current and older Detroiters resent the recent influx of residents and business into the city’s Midtown section, which includes Wayne State University. Part of the reason for the anger is that most of the new arrivals are young white suburban residents. The black residents feel they are trying to “swoop in and take the city away from them.”
“We’re all kind of on our knees right now and suddenly on an economic level Detroit is an option that many wouldn’t have considered it before,” Cooper said. “So now, we’re having an unusual integration. I always say that Detroit’s the only city that could be gentrified by people that have no money.
“When you look at the question of ‘Is Detroit ready for a white mayor?,’ if you talk to average people on the streets, they’ll say ‘Whoever can turn on my lights, have at it.’ We are desperate for leadership and we welcome anyone who can help us out. I’d rather have five white neighbors than have five empty houses.”
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