In an editorial of July 25, 1967, theWashington Postcharacterized the riot then raging in Detroit as “the greatest tragedy of all the long succession of Negro ghetto outbursts.” “For years,” the Post editorialized, “Detroit has been the American model of intelligence and courage applied to the governance of a huge industrial city.” The Post was referring specifically to developments in Detroit that had followed the accession to the mayoralty in January 1962 of Jerome P. Cavanagh.¹

What especially attracted favorable national attention to Detroit during the Cavanagh years was the reputed state of its race relations. The Cavanagh...

“Detroit in Decline” was the caption for aTimemagazine story of October 26, 1961. The article noted the federal government’s classification of Detroit as a place of “substantial and persistent unemployment,” the exodus of the white middle class to the suburbs, and the blight that was “creeping like a fungus through many of Detroit’s proud old neighborhoods.” According to another periodical, Detroit as of 1961 was known for three things: “automobiles, bad race relations and civic sloth.”¹ This was the city of which Jerome P. Cavanagh became mayor on January 2, 1962.

The Detroit city government was of the...

Following the riot, a Kerner Commission staffer reported that he had not found a single black in Detroit who was “happy” about conditions in the city.¹ Throughout the years of the Cavanagh mayoralty preceding the July 1967 riot, there was, indeed, a steady drumbeat of complaints by blacks regarding their general condition and the racial status quo in Detroit. Those conditions and the black perception of them do not in themselves fully explain why the riot occurred, when it occurred, and where in the city it occurred, but one can nevertheless assume that since it was blacks primarily who rioted,...

Low incomes, unemployment, and the poverty that resulted were disproportionately the lot of blacks as compared to whites in the nation and in Detroit in the 1960s. President Lyndon B. Johnson declared war on poverty in his State of the Union address in January 1964, and Congress responded in August by passing the Economic Opportunity Act. Detroit by that time had launched its own war on poverty and was better able than other cities to seek its share of the funds federal law made available.

Blacks in Detroit gained markedly in income as compared to whites and as compared to...

“Perhaps the major domestic conflict of the 1960s,” Harlan Hahn and Joe R. Feagin have asserted, “was produced by the urban confrontation of predominantly white police forces and expanding black communities.” The “black hostility toward the police,” they noted, “became so common and so intense that the mere presence of a white policeman performing routine duties in the ghetto, when coupled with other conditions conducive to unrest, often was sufficient to ignite explosive violence.” In Detroit it was a police action on Twelfth Street, “coupled with other conditions,” that precipitated the great July 1967 riot. It is not surprising that...

“I feel,” Ray Girardin declared in March 1967, “that police departments are as obliged to prevent civil unrest as they are to prevent crimes.” This meant having not only an effective program of police–community relations but also a plan to prevent civil disorders from getting out of control. When Girardin, however, upon becoming police commissioner asked Superintendent Eugene Reuter for a copy of the department’s riot plan, his response, as Girardin recalled it, was “What riot plans?” The Police Department, as a matter of fact, had a manual of procedures for dealing with crowd–control problems that had developed...

The precipitating incident of the Detroit riot of 1967 was a police raid on a blind pig that began in an entirely routine manner. Blind pigs, afterhours drinking establishments, had served middle-class blacks in Detroit when they were effectively barred from downtown restaurants and bars. After 1948, when white facilities began to serve blacks, blind pigs, according to Hubert Locke, became “the haunts of off-duty prostitutes, pimps, narcotics peddlers, and out-of-towners looking for a little action.” This may, indeed, have been the view of middle-class blacks, but it is doubtful that ghetto blacks saw blind pigs as dens of iniquity....

In terms of criminal offenses reported to the Detroit Police Department, the hours between midnight and 5:00 A.M. on July 24 were the most violent of the entire Detroit riot.¹ It was during these hours that Governor George Romney first contacted Washington about the possible use of federal troops. For the remainder of the day the Detroit police, the National Guard, and the State Police sought in vain to quell the escalating disturbance while, behind the scenes, Romney engaged in labyrinthine negotiations with the Johnson administration that led, eventually, to the dispatch of army paratroopers to Detroit and their deployment...

The Department of the Army’s July 24 instructions to General Throckmorton for Operation Garden Plot, the code name for the army’s civil disturbance plan, directed him to use “minimum force” in Detroit, but without jeopardizing his mission “to restore or maintain law and order.” The army was to apply force, according to the instructions, in the following order of priority: (1) unloaded rifles with bayonets fixed and sheathed; (2) unloaded rifles with bare bayonets fixed; (3) riot control agent CS (gas); and (4) loaded rifles with bare bayonets fixed. Only Throckmorton was authorized to order the use of gas. He...

“It would now appear,” George E. Bushnell, Jr., wrote the deputy director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Law on August 3, 1967, “that, for all practical purposes, the United States Constitution was absolutely suspended from sometime during the evening of Sunday, July 23rd, to Tuesday, August 1, 1967.” Bushnell was referring to the operation of the criminal justice system as it applied to the thousands of persons arrested during the Detroit riot. In Ray Girardin’s view, by contrast, it was the large number of arrests, which, he maintained, was “fully effective in getting people off the streets,”...

A Vietnam veteran who was staying in the Algiers Motel during the night of July 25, 1967, stated a week later that he had “lived through a night of horror and murder in Detroit,” worse than anything he had experienced in Vietnam. What occurred during that “night of horror” and its aftermath came to symbolize for many “the riot, police action, [and] the administration of justice itself.” Three young blacks were shot to death in the motel in the early morning hours of July 26, and law enforcement officers beat and terrorized other blacks and whites. It is difficult, however,...

The Detroit riot was “the worst civil disorder” experienced by an American city in the twentieth century.¹ The damage caused by the riot took various forms: the numerous stores that were looted or burned; the homes that were damaged or destroyed by fire; the loss of wages for workers and of sales for businesses; the additional costs incurred by city, state, and federal governments; the injuries sustained by civilians and law enforcement personnel; and, above all, the lives that were lost.

The most conspicuous form of riot damage was the looted and/or burned store. According to the American Insurance Association,...

While the riot raged in Detroit, the black and white communities of the city reacted in various ways to the unfolding events. For public officials and voluntary organizations, the problem was how best to deal with the myriad problems the riot produced.

Frustrated by the events that had shattered Detroit’s image as a model city in race relations and imperiled his own political future, Mayor Cavanagh concluded that he had been communicating with the wrong blacks. The black leaders on whom he had relied, he blurted out, did not “even know the people in the streets. I’ve got to talk...

It is difficult, if not impossible, to speak with certainty regarding the identity of the Detroit rioters and the reasons why they behaved as they did. The best evidence is that the riots of the 1960s, including the Detroit riot, were unrelated to the characteristics of particular cities. After examining disturbances in 673 cities between 1961 and 1968, Seymour Spilerman concluded that, controlling for the size of the black population in the cities, neither the occurrence nor severity of the riots outside the South was “contingent upon Negro conditions or their social or economic status in a community.” That riots...

The Detroit riot and the other riots of the 1960s were quite unlike the “communal riots” of an earlier time that were characterized by interracial conflict between blacks and whites. Was it, indeed, a riot at all, or was it, as at least some blacks to this day prefer to label it, a “rebellion”? By a four-to-one margin (48 to 13 percent), Detroit blacks questioned on this point in a survey conducted just after the riot preferred the term “riot.” In the Campbell-Schuman survey a few months later, however, the percentages were reversed, 56 percent as compared to 19 percent...

Whites and blacks in Detroit just after the riot viewed what had happened and its consequences in very different ways. As two University of Michigan political scientists put it, “for the most part it was as if two different events had taken place in the same city, one a calculated act of criminal anarchy, the other a spontaneous protest against mistreatment and injustice.”¹

When asked in the Luby community survey which of three possible interpretations came closest to explaining why the riot had occurred, 69 percent of the blacks but only 28 percent of the whites thought it was because...

In their discussion of the “ghetto revolts” of the 1960s, Joe R. Feagin and Harlan Hahn indicated that the “establishment response” to the riots took three forms: the riot commission, the “law enforcement response,” and the adoption of social and economic reforms to allay ghetto grievances. “The most conspicuous governmental reaction,” they noted, was the appointment of a riot commission that documented the causes and course of the rioting and proposed remedies to forestall a recurrence.¹

Following discussions with several urban specialists and the establishment of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission), Mayor Cavanagh decided against...

“In addition to being the scene of the nation’s worst Negro riot of this period, Detroit,” theDetroit Free Pres’sPhilip Meyer judged in November 1968, “may be remembered as the city that tried the hardest to do the most for racial peace” in response to a riot. Five years later J. David Greenstone and Paul Peterson concluded that Detroit’s Mayor Cavanagh “responded in a more ameliorative, less punitive fashion to the 1967 race riots than did the mayor of any other large city.”¹ The same generalization can also be made regarding the riot response of Detroit's private sector. If...

As the city that had been viewed as the nation’s model in race relations but had nevertheless experienced the nation’s worst riot, Detroit continued to attract a great deal of attention after July 1967. Periodically, especially at the time of the great riot’s anniversary date, newsmen and others took the city’s pulse to test the health of the patient and its reaction to the terrible shock its system had experienced.

During the first year after the riot the qualitative judgment about conditions in Detroit tended to be quite pessimistic. “The long standing problems are still problems,” Father James Sheehan wrote...