One riot, one July
Despite the wording of the title, there was no second Detroit riot in 1968. The riot happened in July 1967, beginning on Sunday 23 July and ending around 27-28 July. What stretches across 1967-1968 is the aftermath: the political and civic response, the national inquiry, the continuing departure of residents, and a baseball season that many people later described as a moment of healing. The events of the riot itself are told in the main narrative on this site; this article picks up afterward.
The New Detroit Committee
In the weeks after the fighting, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Governor George Romney backed the formation of a civic body that became known as the New Detroit Committee. It brought business leaders, labor officials, clergy and Black community figures together, with department store executive Joseph L. Hudson Jr. often named as its chairman. Its stated aim was to rebuild burned areas, expand job opportunities and deal with the grievances behind the unrest.
The committee drew attention nationally because it tied the city’s biggest employers to the repair effort. It raised money, backed job training and housing efforts, and supported community programs. Its record is mixed in the view of later writers. Supporters credit it with keeping lines open between downtown and Black neighborhoods; critics note that much of the burned land stayed empty for years and that the underlying problems proved much larger than a volunteer civic group could solve. Claims of specific totals, such as jobs created, are best treated with caution.
The Kerner verdict
President Johnson created the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on 27 July 1967, while Detroit was still smouldering. Led by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, it became known as the Kerner Commission, and it studied Detroit, Newark and other cities. Its report appeared in late February 1968 and contained the sentence for which it is best known: that the nation was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal.
The commission put the blame for the disorders on conditions rather than on conspiracies, pointing to segregation, poverty, poor housing and police practices, and the attitudes of white society. Detroit appeared in its case studies as one of the main examples. The report sold widely, but Johnson reportedly gave it a cool reception and few of its large spending proposals were adopted.
Law, backlash and 1968
The year 1968 added to the strain. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April, there were disturbances across the country, though Detroit largely avoided a repeat of 1967. Congress passed the Fair Housing Act in the days after King’s death, a law that mattered to a metropolitan area as segregated as Detroit’s. At the same time, a white backlash helped to shape politics in the suburbs and in national campaigns, and the riot became a standing argument in debates about law and order.
Population flight
Detroit had already been losing white residents to the suburbs for years, and the city’s population had peaked around 1950 at roughly 1.8 million. The riot did not start that trend, but it is widely seen as having accelerated it. The population fell markedly in the following decades, and the departure of businesses and middle-class families, white and Black, reduced the tax base. Historians still debate how much of the decline to attribute to the riot compared with deindustrialization, highways and housing policy. A fair summary is that 1967 hastened a movement that had other causes too.
The 1968 Tigers
In 1968 the Detroit Tigers won the American League pennant and then the World Series, beating the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games after trailing three games to one. Mickey Lolich won the deciding game over Bob Gibson. Willie Horton, who had reportedly tried to calm crowds in July 1967, was a central figure on the team. Many local accounts, and a number of newspaper retrospectives, have described the title as a moment that brought the city together.
That claim deserves some care. A championship parade drew large and mixed crowds, and the story became part of Detroit’s self-image, but the title did not undo the damage to neighborhoods or end the exodus of residents. It is better read as a brief shared celebration than as a cure.
What changed, and what did not
By the end of 1968 Detroit had a civic committee, a national report, a championship and an unchanged map of racial separation. The riot’s legacy was less a single moment of reform than a long argument about the causes of inequality, which continued in the decades that followed.