In 1967, Detroit erupted in one of the worst riots in American history, a rebellion against police brutality and racial inequality in a city where many said it couldn’t happen.
Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a three-part series exploring the 1967 Detroit riot. Today’s story looks at the building tensions leading into the riot. Next Sunday, the 50th anniversary of the start of the riot, the Free Press will look at the five days of violence that tore apart the city beginning on July 23, 1967. The following Sunday, we’ll explore the aftermath of the riot and its long-term effects on Detroit.
In May 1967, Jerome Patrick Cavanagh was Detroit’s young, white, vigorous, New Deal Democrat mayor. He had a glowing national reputation but an increasingly unhappy police department and a growing number of frustrated black constituents.
The cops wanted higher salaries. They protested with a ticket-writing slowdown and, later, a “blue flu” strike in which 20% of the 4,380-member force called in sick one day in June, a stunt that put a nervous city further on edge.
The mayor was forced to take the unusual action of going on local television to defend his officers.
“The police, obviously, are doing their job,” Cavanagh said. “And doing it well.”
Not everyone thought so. About 200 leaders in Detroit’s black community that month debated filing a lawsuit against the police because of constant complaints from residents about brutality and the failure of the department to take black crime victims seriously.
There was this evaluation by George Edwards, who quit as Cavanagh’s first police commissioner after butting heads with the department over proposed reforms:
“My job was to teach the police they didn’t have a constitutional right to beat up Negroes on arrest,” said Edwards, a liberal labor activist who had served on the Michigan Supreme Court.
On the surface, Detroit was progressive and its race relations harmonious, at least compared to Southern cities that had been rocked by the civil rights movement and to riot-scarred communities like Watts in Los Angeles, which had burned in 1965, or Newark, N.J., which exploded in violence 11 days before Detroit.
In all, nearly 150 cities would experience a disturbance of some sort in their black neighborhoods in 1967, a year of radical protest and cultural change in Detroit and across the country. Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the armed forces — prosecutors charged him with a crime and boxing officials took away his heavyweight title. Antiwar protests disrupted cities and college campuses. Young black Americans increasingly turned to the fresh concept of “black power,” espoused by combative new groups like the Black Panthers in California.
It was also the Summer of Love, and not only in San Francisco. In Detroit on April 30, a few thousand young people descended on Belle Isle for a “love-in” of music and marijuana that ended in a wild brawl with police when officers tried to ticket a motorcyclist. The MC5 was already the house band at the Grande Ballroom, and the city’s counterculture had its own newspaper — the Fifth Estate — and radio station, WABX-FM.
There were some signs of change: Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967, the first African American running a major city hall. Thurgood Marshall became the first black Supreme Court Justice. The award-winning film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” addressed the subject of racism and interracial dating.
In Detroit, amid this whirlwind of barrier-breaking transformation, underneath the sometimes delusional optimism of city fathers and mothers, pressure continued to mount around the relationship between the overwhelmingly white police force and the city’s 630,000 black citizens.
“At its core was the basic attitude that the police were not there to serve the citizens of the black community, but to beat them back,” Coleman Young, Detroit’s first black mayor, recalled in his autobiography. “Not to protect them, but to discipline them; not to comfort them, but to contain them.”
In late June, at the second Black Arts Conference in Detroit, one of the guest speakers was H. Rap Brown, the nationally known militant who headed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
“Let white America know that the name of the game is tit for tat, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth and a life for a life,” Brown said, shaking his fist. “Motown, if you don’t come around, we are going to burn you down.”
Less than four weeks later, all those pressures detonated in a rebellion that began with a confrontation between police and black patrons of an illegal, after-hours bar — a blind pig — on the near west side. In the resulting five days of violence, 43 people were killed, 7,231 were arrested and 2,509 buildings were destroyed by fire or looting.
“I was amazed at how many white folks were shocked that it happened,” John Eddings said last year in an interview for the Detroit Historical Museum’s oral-history project. Born in Mississippi in 1943, he came with his parents to Detroit as a child after his father found a job in an auto parts plant. He served as Detroit’s ombudsman from 1995 to 2004.
Eddings added: “They just couldn’t comprehend it because I think they’ve never been that angry. They’ve never been in those situations that cause that type of anger. It was an attention-getter.”
The many charms of Detroit
Ostensibly, the summer of 1967 looked like a good one for Detroit.
The Big Three automakers controlled 90% of the domestic market, and billboard-like counters along city freeways displayed the continuously updated total of vehicles produced. Motown Records swaggered through a decade in which it would churn out 110 Top 10 hits. The Tigers were contenders.
Detroit was much bigger and busier 50 years ago. With more than 1.5 million residents in 1967 — some 827,000 more than today — only New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia were more populous. There were 300,000 public school students in 350 schools, plus a Catholic school system that included more than 100 grade schools and 50 high schools. Downtown had 12 movie theaters, with another 35 spread across city neighborhoods. Cinephiles could even see the international hit from France, “A Man and a Woman,” in the Studio 1 theater at Livernois and Davison. The city’s main streets were crowded. One guidebook noted Detroit’s pace was hectic.
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Downtown Detroit was still the commercial and entertainment center of southeast Michigan; such far-flung edge cities as Troy, Southfield and Sterling Heights were still developing. Downtown was mixture of old and new: You could do all your Christmas shopping at J.L. Hudson’s, walk past stone-faced Nation of Islam members on Woodward Avenue selling “Muhammad Speaks” and encounter young men furtively peddling watches and diamond rings at Kennedy Square.
White baby boomers who grew up in that era often speak rapturously today about the pleasures of living on tidy and densely packed residential streets shaded by elm trees, eating chocolate sundaes at a Sander’s soda fountain in their neighborhood commercial district and playing in well-tended parks.
Aging African Americans, too, have fond memories of their childhoods in the city. In the oral history he recorded for the historical museum, the Rev. Wendell Anthony, longtime president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, recalled spending Saturday afternoons at the Avalon Theater at Linwood and Davison and playing sports in parks and on the street.
“A nice neighborhood, a lot of trees,” Anthony said. “Folks could sit on their front porch and you could do what you want to do until the streetlights came on.”
Beneath the surface calm and national attention on Detroit’s progressive approach to problem-solving was an ominous trend: The city’s economy was unraveling. Between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs, both from the closures of major automakers such as Hudson and Packard and the disappearance of dozens of smaller firms.
“What was new in the 1950s was that auto manufacturers and suppliers permanently reduced their Detroit-area workforces, closed plants and relocated to others parts of the country,” wrote historian Thomas Sugrue in his 1997 survey of postwar Detroit, “The Origins of the Urban Crisis.”
Along with jobs, white people were fleeing the city long before 1967. The white population declined by more than 350,000 in the 1950s alone; many of them headed to the suburbs, whose lure included bigger lawns, less crime, better schools and homogeneous neighborhoods. Northland shopping center opened in 1954 in Southfield.
Black Detroiters were not welcome in most suburbs in 1967. If they dared to move across a suburban city limit, their new neighbors often would attack them.
In June 1967, when a biracial couple with two children bought a pink bungalow in Warren — then one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, thanks largely to white Detroiters moving across 8 Mile Road — neighbors jeered, threw rocks and smoke bombs and picketed in front of their house. Someone wrote the N-word on the garage door.
Similar attacks took place in Detroit, from the late 1940s into the 1960s, as racial residential barriers slowly began crumbling within the city limits.
In his book, Sugrue wrote: “White Detroiters instigated over 200 incidents against blacks moving into formerly all-white neighborhoods, including harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism and physical attacks.”
In the same era, white Detroiters also founded nearly 200 neighborhood organizations that gradually became bulwarks to fight integration, or, as it was sometimes described, “black invasion.” Residents of all-white neighborhoods on the far east and west sides of the city watched nervously and defiantly as these angry neighborhood showdowns appeared to be coming their way.
Cavanagh was 39 in the summer of 1967 and had been mayor for 5½ years. The son of an Irish-immigrant boilermaker, he grew up in the Grand River and Livernois neighborhood, graduated from St. Cecelia High School, the University of Detroit and U of D law school.
As mayor, one of his greatest accomplishments was aggressively pursuing federal funds and selling President Lyndon Johnson on the idea to make Detroit a showplace for his Great Society programs.
Detroit became known as a “model city” nationally because of the way Cavanagh approached urban problems such as race relations and poverty. He charmed many out-of-town reporters, such as Fortune Magazine’s Stanley H. Brown, who wrote in 1965 that “of all the accomplishments in the recent history of the city, the most significant is the progress Detroit has made in race relations.”
Cavanagh financed his Total Action Against Poverty program and many others through nearly $360 million (about $2.7 billion in today’s dollars) in federal funds during his first five years in office, though the Kerner Commission report, which analyzed the urban riots of the 1960s, said “the money appeared to have little impact on the grassroots.” In 1966, Cavanagh became the first mayor to head both the United States Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities.
Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Cavanagh was his commitment to the black cause.
Unlike most white politicians in northern big cities in the 1960s, Cavanagh had the audacity to align his administration — and political career — to the black civil rights movement that by 1967 had “shattered the power of white supremacy,” as historian Kevin Boyle has written. In 1963, Cavanagh welcomed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Detroit and walked with King on Woodward Avenue in the 125,000-person March to Freedom.
Cavanagh “had the courage to ride the wave” the civil rights movement created, “the vision to imagine the new city that could be built once the old structures had been obliterated,” Boyle wrote.
Black voters had played a major role in putting Cavanagh in the mayor’s office in 1962 after incumbent Louis Miriani’s office had staged a crime crackdown, which targeted African-American men. In 1966, though, after Cavanagh had won re-election as mayor with a remarkable 69% of the vote, he made a major miscalculation: He ran for the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator against G. Mennen Williams, a former governor who was very popular in the black community. Black voters turned away from Cavanagh, supporting Williams, who won the primary but lost the general election to Robert Griffin.
In 1967, criticism of Cavanagh intensified. City Councilwoman Mary Beck made a failed attempt to hold a recall vote against the mayor, saying crime had turned Detroit into a city of fear. Similarly, a popular local TV talk show host, the acerbic Lou Gordon, ripped Cavanagh regularly, often in highly personal ways, accusing him of financial shenanigans and ethical lapses. In addition, Cavanagh and wife, Mary Helen, were experiencing marriage difficulties in 1967, which also made news. They had eight children.
Beyond Cavanagh’s glowing national press clippings, bulging treasury of federal funds and support from many African-American leaders, Detroit was profoundly troubled and poor black sections of the city were seething.
“Beneath a surface calm there was a good deal of unrest in the black community,” wrote Sidney Fine, the late University of Michigan historian whose 1989 book, “Violence in the Model City,” is the definitive study of the events of July 1967.
“We were angry,” the late Mike Hamlin, a longtime activist in black and labor causes, told an interviewer in 2015.
“This thing was building. It was building up to Watts, ’67 Detroit, Newark, and so forth. Within us, something was going to explode one way or another. I mean, I had some very nefarious ideas at the time. But anyway, you know, our folks had endured humiliation and abuse so long that — you know, there was rage within the young black man.”
By 1967, African Americans had grown to roughly 40% of Detroit’s population, but held nowhere near that proportion of important positions in Detroit’s government, labor, judicial, corporate offices or in the skilled trades.
Despite several years of efforts to increase the number of minority officers, the percentage of black uniformed personnel in the Police Department in 1967 was just 5%.
Yet, African Americans had developed a sophisticated infrastructure of black-oriented media, cultural organizations and pressure groups, and black Detroiters had become increasingly militant about securing their rights.
Statistically, black Detroiters were better off than most other black Americans because of the city’s good union jobs, but they trailed white Detroiters in education, income and access to good jobs. In 1967, 12.4% of white Detroiters lived under the poverty level; among African Americans, the figure was 20%. The unemployment rate in Detroit was 6.2% overall, but for young black people living in the areas where violence broke out, it was estimated to be 25% to 30%.
Detroit had a long history of biracial leftist activism, but starting in the early 1960s, a wide variety of black-run organizations joined the fight for African-American rights. They included the NAACP; the Detroit Urban League, the Congress of Racial Equality; the Trade Union Leadership Conference; the Freedom Now Party; the Baptist Ministerial Alliance; the Group on Advanced Leadership; UHURU (Freedom Now in Swahili) and Adult Community Movement for Equality (ACME). An integrated group focused on housing, the West Central Organization bedeviled city officials with such aggressive tactics as setting up tents on the housing director’s front lawn.
Young activists from ACME, a grassroots antipoverty organization on the east side, complained of police harassment, and in August 1966, an incident between ACME members and cops ignited a three-day disturbance along Kercheval Avenue that was contained by an overwhelming police presence and community peacekeepers. Some observers say the success of putting down that disturbance gave city leaders a false sense of security that Detroit could keep the lid on any incident.
One of the most outspoken black leaders was the Rev. Albert Cleage Jr., who grew up in a middle-class Detroit home, the son of a physician who was prominent in the black community. After stops in Kentucky, California and Massachusetts as a young minister, Cleage returned to Detroit and eventually became pastor of Central United Church of Christ at Linwood Avenue and Hogarth in 1957.
During the next decade, Cleage’s ideology evolved from progressive black activist to militant black nationalist, constantly pushing for black self-determination while remaining skeptical of working with white people. In the 1960s, Cleage and family members published an influential newsletter, Illustrated News, and, with brothers Richard and Milton Henry, founded the activist and all-black Group on Advanced Leadership, to fight bias.
According to the University of Michigan’s Angela Dillard, Cleage, leery of white liberals, kept Cavanagh at arms-length, once saying he believed the mayor, despite his reputation for embracing black causes, had not been made fully “aware of the role the Negro must play in this community.”
Detroit Police Department
A massive amount of evidence from surveys, media reports and city documents shows the Detroit Police Department was black Detroiters’ biggest grievance in 1967. Complaints ranged from lack of politeness on the part of officers to outright brutality.
There were many black critics of the department, but white city leaders mostly supported the police or stayed silent.
Edwards, Cavanagh’s first police commissioner and a highly regarded judge, was an exception. In 1965, he noted that police patrol white neighborhoods differently than black areas.
“There, they tend to view each person on the streets as a potential criminal or enemy, and all too often that attitude is reciprocated,” Edwards wrote of black neighborhoods.
One almost universal focus of the anger of black men in the 1960s was a unit known as the Big Four — a big car with big guns in the trunk, a uniformed driver and three well-dressed plainclothes officers who responded to dangerous calls, and, according to innumerable accounts, harassed and brutalized African Americans.
When Darryle Buchanan was 11 in 1966-67, he was playing outside his mother’s parked car as she shopped at 12th Street and West Grand Boulevard. His brother and sister were in the vehicle. An unmarked police car pulled up.
“It’s Big Four,” he told a history museum interviewer. “I’m standing there and talking to them and I had my hands where they could see my hands and I’m telling them, ‘What’s the problem, officer?’ So this one cop walked up and grabbed me by the lapels of my coat — this is how small I was and how big this guy was. He picked me up by the lapels of my coat, my feet were dangling, and he was shaking me, and he was saying, ‘Where’s your knife?’ I said, ‘Officer I don’t have a knife.’ “
The encounter ended when Buchanan’s mother returned. She worked nearby at the Henry Ford Hospital emergency room, and knew the cop. He put down her son and left.
Isaiah (Ike) McKinnon, the future chief of police, received a severe beating from a Big Four crew when he was 14.
“That’s what made me want to become a police officer,” McKinnon said. “Because I said we’ve got to have some police officers who think differently than what those guys did, who’s going to be fair with everyone, regardless of race.”
Detroit cops felt they were under siege, and they fought back. They disliked Cavanagh because of his liberalism, alignment with African Americans and his refusal to raise their pay to $10,000 a year. In the late spring, police, building on their ticket-slowdown strategy, executed their “blue flu” strike, calling in sick in large numbers. That drastic action frightened many Detroiters and created a sense of crisis at City Hall. The situation was defused when the two sides agreed to move to the bargaining table.
Partially driving the residents’ fear of crime was a rise in the homicide total for the first half of 1967. Two deaths in the early summer with a racial element further rattled the black community.
On June 24, 1967, a black Vietnam War vet and Ford worker, Daniel Thomas, was shot and killed during a harrowing encounter with a group of young white men in Rouge Park, then surrounded by all-white neighborhoods. The fatal shot rang out from a crowd that had chased Thomas and his pregnant wife, Louise, to a park building. The men had threatened to rape Louise Thomas. She was not harmed in the park, but later suffered a miscarriage.
“I got down on my knees and begged them to leave us alone,” Louise Thomas told the Free Press in 1967.
Thomas lived less than a mile from 12th and Clairmount, where the riot broke out, and his death and the threats to his wife ignited days of rumors in the black community that white men were involved in a conspiracy to rape black women.
“But nobody in the white community was concerned,” Richard Marks, Cavanagh’s chief of the Commission of Community Relations, said in a 1984 interview with U-M’s Fine.
The black-owned Michigan Chronicle newspaper said: “As (civil rights activist) James Meredith marched again Sunday to prove a Negro could walk in Mississippi without fear, a young woman who saw her husband killed by a white gang shouting, ‘(N-word) keep out of Rouge Park,’ lost her baby.”
Prosecutors charged Michael Palchlopek, 23, of Detroit with first-degree murder.
A week after the Thomas shooting, a black prostitute named Vivian Williams was shot and killed at 12th Street and Hazelwood. According to rumors among black Detroiters, Williams was killed by a white cop after she had slashed him. The police department provided two explanations: She was killed by a customer she had spurned and she was killed by her pimp. The confusion was never clarified. Williams’ death recalled the 1963 shooting death by a police officer of a prostitute named Cynthia Scott, which had enraged the black community and spurred many African Americans and white liberals to step up their criticism and scrutiny of the police.
Williams was killed at 12th and Hazelwood, two blocks south of where the riot began.
There is no street in Detroit that resembles 12th Street in 2017, but there was no street in Detroit in 1967 that resembled 12th Street, which was renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in 1976.
North of West Grand Boulevard, 12th Street was a tightly packed and busy thoroughfare lined with two- and three-story residential buildings whose ground floors were filled with food stores, bars, pharmacies, beauty parlors and bakeries. The neighborhood was the most crowded residential district in the city. While many middle- and working-class families lived in homes and apartments on nearby side streets, 12th Street north of Virginia Park was a feverish sin strip that hosted a range of adult entertainment, some of it legal. Its prostitutes, drugs, gambling and after-hours clubs attracted black and white customers from southeast Michigan and out-of-town thrill seekers from Ontario and Ohio.
Through World War II, the area had been largely Jewish, but after the war, Jews began moving northwest as black Detroiters moved in after the city kicked them out of the Black Bottom neighborhood downtown so developers could build the Lafayette Park housing development for prosperous white people.
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“Twelfth Street was like a jungle of an unsolvable maze,” a young resident, Bill Scott III, recalled in a self-published memoir two years later, “a Hollywood strip” filled with “shady characters” hanging out on corners.
“It was hard to predict what was going to happen next — I mean one night somebody might get shot or cut up and next night everybody on the street could be happy and cool; plain drunk.”
Scott’s father, William Scott II, was, like many African Americans 50 years ago, a Southern transplant to Detroit as a child who found well-paying work in auto factories until the mass layoffs of the 1950s. The elder Scott, unable to find a legitimate job and having a family to support, turned to hustling, becoming a player in the city’s underground numbers racket, the lottery-like daily gambling game played by many residents.
Scott II also delved into grass-roots political organizing. He saw the lack of black office-holders and wanted to do something about it. He rented a second-floor suite of rooms above an empty print shop and called his organization the United Community League for Civic Action.
Eventually he also began using his space for parties and they sometimes lasted past the 2 a.m. closing time, and he charged for drinks, meaning it was an illegal drinking joint, a so-called blind pig. The building’s address was 9125 Twelfth, corner of Clairmount.
Next Sunday: An early morning police raid sparks five days of deadly violence across much of the city.