DETROIT - A rebellion: That's what Frank Thomas, like many longtime Detroiters, calls the riot of July 1967.
To most observers, a riot is a riot. It was senseless violence and opportunistic looting.
For Thomas, it wasn't that simple.
It was an uprising; a vent for homebrewed rage simmering in the black community for years.
Black Detroiters dealt with a lot back then.
Many were displaced from their homes in the historic Black Bottom and Paradise Valley areas to make way for highway construction and "urban renewal" projects.
Their new living conditions in LaSalle Gardens and the Virginia Park neighborhoods were far from ideal.
"We didn't own anything," Thomas said outside the Joseph Walker Williams Community Center on Rosa Parks Blvd., then known as 12th Street, where the rioting began.
"We had to buy rotting meat from the different stores. After it came out of the suburbs, they took it down here and sold it to us. We wanted better businesses. We wanted quality food.
"Basically, we wanted to be a part of the city of Detroit instead of being second-class citizens."
That's why Thomas said he and other young men looted and set buildings ablaze on July 23, 1967.
He was just 23 years old at the time - a rebellious youth with a chip on his shoulder and nothing to lose.
"You gotta understand what the purpose was behind that," he said.
"It wasn't so much 'go out and loot and steal stuff.' It was to open up opportunities for black people to own businesses. You see, you can only hold a person down for so long. After a while, they're going to get tired. And that's what happened."
Fifty years later, Thomas stands by his decision to take to the streets, even though the uprising dented the city's spirit for decades afterward.
Sitting on a flower bed outside the community center, gazing out onto the mass of concrete lots, strip malls and old houses along 12th Street, Thomas reflected on the meaning of that word - rebellion.
Brewing a riot
Detroit's first major race riot took place in 1943, when, amid rising tensions over housing and workplace segregation, rumors spread that that whites had thrown a black woman and her baby off of the Belle Isle Bridge and that black men had raped a white woman in the same area, according to the Detroit Historical Society.
Nine whites and 25 African Americans were killed in the 1943 riot.
Later came the uprooting of the city's historic black neighborhoods in the 1950s, followed by other riots cropping up in different cities around the nation.
By the late 1960s, many who participated in those riots found their way to Detroit seeking opportunity.
Thomas said they found none.
"Those people coming in from different other cities met up and they planned this," he said.
"Right down there where Gordon Park is now. That was the after-hours joint."
Eventually, Detroit police raided the club on 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue, sowing the seeds of the infamous melee that killed 43 people.
Thomas had heard about the mess on radio and television. He was at his house on Linwood Street and Montgomery Avenue, and decided that looting a few stores sounded like "a good time."
"I was doing what everyone else was doing: looting," he said.
"It was a jewelry store right there on Grand River and Oakland. I was going for the nice stuff. I was young. So I went up in there."
No sooner than he entered, police arrived and arrested Thomas and a few others. He was carted off to the 10th precinct station. The building was so full of prisoners - many of them women and children - they were housed in a hot police station garage guarded by officers, and later by National Guardsmen.
The cramped quarters caused police officers to let Thomas go that evening.
He stayed indoors for the remainder of the riot.
"Most people I know, when they said curfew, we obeyed the curfew," Thomas said. "We did what we was supposed to do."
A burned city bears new fruit
Despite the challenges, Thomas said the years that followed the riot offered more opportunities for black people who were previously deprived of basic resources.
"The biggest impact after the riot was we was able to own businesses," he said.
"They put up the small business loans. I knew people who thought they could never own a business, and they had businesses then."
Some of them owned clubs. Others opened small grocery stores or beer and wine depots, most of which were white-owned before 1967.
There was soon a black mayor. There were black police officers and firefighters, and black representation on those two forces grew, despite ongoing racial tensions.
"They allow us to do so much more that we can do that we couldn't before," he said. "There's more equality today than there was back then."
For those reasons and more, Thomas doesn't believe a riot of that scale could happen again in Detroit.
"(It won't happen) unless we get pushed too far back into the corner again," Thomas said.
"... All we can do is wait and see. And pray."