The Grande Ballroom in Detroit wasn't destroyed in the 1967 riots, but images like this one of the city came to be because of that terrible week in July 1967. (Image used under Creative Commons license.)
I was 16 in the summer of 1967. I'd just got my driver's license. My boyfriend lived at the other end of the block. We lived in Grosse Pointe Woods, an affluent, all-white suburb on the edge of Detroit. My father worked just a few blocks from the area where the 1967 Detroit riots broke out. I was comfortable going into the city for shopping, museums and entertainment.
But the week of July 23, I heard gunfire in the distance as I lay in my safe, surburban bed. Detroit erupted in riots that have been ranked among the worst in U.S. history. For five days, the city was in insurrection. First the state police were called in. Then the National Guard. Then President Johnson sent in federal troops.
Tanks rolled through the streets of Detroit. Forty-three people died. Hundreds were injured. Thousands were arrested. Thousands of buildings were burned. Families were left homeless.
In the end, the greatest casualty of that week of rage was the city itself. Detroit, once the powerhouse of American prosperity, died a slow, agonizing death after the riots. The number of plans to stop the decline and turn the city around were without number. None succeeded.
Today, 48 years later, there are some tentative signs of life, but the most robust revitalization plan will never bring Detroit back to what it was.
The Detroit police touched off the riots. They had a reputation for brutality and racism. There were few minorities on the force and minorities bore the brunt of out-of-control behavior.
But it wasn't the police who bore the consequences of the rioting. It was everybody else.
I read a comment in another diary on the Baltimore unrest that said, "Let it burn." The poster was trying to say the Baltimore police were getting what they deserve.
I can't argue that the behavior of the Baltimore police since the death in custody of Freddy Gray has not been beyond horrible. Watching a police spokesman deflect every question about the incident in an interview turned my stomach.
But it isn't the police who will bear the consequences of this unrest. They'll get a free pass for everything that happens now, because they are "restoring order."
We need the police to restore order once rocks have been thrown and stores have been looted. Nobody wants to live in a "Mad Max" blasted out landscape of anarchy. The people who live in that area are in fear of their lives and their homes.
The rioting plays into the narrative of needing "strong policing."
There are a lot of similarities between the unrest in Baltimore and the summer of 1967 in Detroit.
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My own family left the city in the early 1950s. It had nothing to do with race. My parents were renters in an Italian-American neighborhood. My dad had come along well enough in his job to afford a down payment on a house. My parents wanted a shiny new house with a yard big enough for gardening. They bought a brand-new house in a new subdivision just outside the city. Before 1967, that was the main reason people moved out of Detroit.
We moved to a bigger, older house in Grosse Pointe Woods in the early '60s. Then, the main reason for the move was to get me, my sister and brothers into better schools.
Detroit had begun its decline by then. Mayor Jerry Cavanaugh, a rising star in the Democratic party, came into office as a reformer. He tried to reign in the Detroit police, appointing a new police chief. Cavanaugh welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. to the city and marched with him down Woodward Avenue in 1963. Later, Cavanaugh had strong ties with Lyndon Johnson and got major grants from Johnson's Model Cities program.
But sometimes well-meaning reformers make things worse. His attempts to reform the police antagonized the force and they resisted change. The federal grants were mostly used to raze and redevelop poor black neighborhoods, forcing those people out of their homes to resettle in other areas of the city, where they were not welcome.
Racial tensions were on the rise.
Detroit was around 30 percent black in the 1960s. There was a substantial black middle class created by the auto industry. The "Great Migration" from the South to the industrial north, particularly to Detroit, of the 1920s was a distant memory. Many black families found higher wages and a better standard of living coming to Detroit in the early part of the 20th century. But the children and grandchildren of the migrants were finding many doors closed to them. The schools in black areas of the city were inferior. Unemployment was high. The police, as today, were disproportionately harsh in their treatment of minorities.
On July 23, 1967, several officers raided a "blind pig" on 12th Street in Detroit. Blind pigs date back to prohibition. Detroit was a center of bootlegging because of its proximity to Canada. When prohibition ended, the blind pigs continued as centers of black social life in Detroit. They were unlicensed and frequently raided.
A scuffle outside the blind pig grew into an angry crowd throwing bottles and rocks at police. The police withdrew, thinking the crowd would get tired and go home. They didn't.
Five days later, 43 people were dead. More than two thousand buildings had been burned. More than 7,000 people had been arrested. And Detroit's fate was sealed.
The middle-class black businesses that were destroyed in the rioting were mostly never rebuilt.
Today, a city that had more than a million residents 1967 has less than 700,000. White flight happened. But it wasn't just white flight. It was the flight of money. Anybody who could afford to move out of the city did, leaving the poorest of the poor. The schools deteriorated further.
Whole neighborhoods emptied out leaving nothing but the rotting hulks of houses. The economy went underground.
Finally, the city went bankrupt.
(You can make an argument about Republican governmental complicity in the bankruptcy, and I won't deny that was in the mix. But that the end of the day, there was no money to meet the city's obligations from bond payments to writing paychecks.)
Today, we're on the other side of the bankruptcy. There are signs of life in the city. The riots are nearly 50 years behind us.
But, make no mistake. Anyone who is talking about revitalizing Detroit knows it's going to be an uphill battle. We need good jobs, and not just for engineers and venture capitalists. We need to rebuild a crumbling infrastructure. We need to clear the ruins of the old city and consolidate into a smaller, more manageable area.
None of that is going to happen easily or without disruption.
So, if you think we should "let Baltimore burn," stop for a moment and look at Detroit. The riots here touched off a half-century of misery and decay.
Would Detroit have continued its decline without the riots? Probably, but not so precipitously.
I can't think of anything good that came out of the riots. Social justice? No. Economic renewal? No. Even reform of the police department? Not one bit.
Malace Green was beaten to death by a cop with a flashlight in 1992, 25 years after the riots.