A boom, and who shared in it
The riot began on 23 July 1967, in the middle of a year that was, for the Detroit auto industry, a reasonably good one. The riot itself was a one-week event, and “a year of turmoil” is a loose description; the more accurate point is that the disorder broke out in a city that looked, by many national measures, prosperous. That contrast is what made the riot so shocking to outsiders, and it is why economic history is essential to understanding it.
Detroit was the home of the Big Three automakers, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, and of a large web of supplier firms. The 1960s were generally strong years for car sales, and the American economy as a whole was expanding under the policies of Lyndon Johnson’s administration. Popular new models, including the pony car craze started by the Ford Mustang in 1964, helped fill factories. Wages in the auto plants, backed by the United Auto Workers, were among the best available to industrial workers anywhere in the country.
Black and white workers
Many Black Detroiters had come to the city for exactly those jobs, as part of the Great Migration from the South. By the 1960s, Black workers were a large part of the auto workforce, but they were not distributed equally. Historians describe a pattern in which Black workers were concentrated in the hardest, hottest and most dangerous jobs, such as foundries and heavy assembly, and were underrepresented in skilled trades, supervision and management. Promotions and apprenticeships were harder to obtain, and union leadership was largely white.
Outside the plants the gap was larger. Black unemployment, and especially unemployment among young Black men, ran well above the white rate in Detroit, as in other northern cities, and a large share of Black families lived in poverty even when the city’s overall economy was strong. Exact figures differ by source and by year, so it is safest to state the pattern rather than one number. The Kerner Commission would later highlight such patterns across the country.
Cavanagh and the model city
Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, elected in 1961 at the age of 33, built a national reputation as a young liberal who could work with business, labor and Black leaders. His administration won substantial federal money from the War on Poverty and other programs, and Detroit was often held up as an example of how a large industrial city could use Washington’s help. The city was an early and prominent participant in the federal Model Cities program, which aimed to rebuild whole neighborhoods with a mix of housing, services and job programs. Cavanagh’s own hopes were tied to that effort.
The model-city reputation had a real basis, since the city had a more active and accessible city hall than many others, and the city’s leaders had met with civil rights groups and had the support of major institutions. But the reputation also encouraged a sense of complacency, among officials and in the national press, that the worst racial problems were behind the city. Some observers used the term “model city” with deepening irony after the riot.
Where the model fell short
Several conditions that the economy did not fix were visible before 1967. Housing was crowded and segregated, a legacy of decades of Detroit housing discrimination, and highway and urban renewal projects had displaced many families. Police relations were poor. Black Detroiters were also hit by the loss of industrial jobs, since carmakers had been moving some production out of the city to suburban and rural plants for years, a trend that left central neighborhoods with fewer jobs near their homes. Many of the city’s residents were also young, which made the shortage of work more acute.
None of these facts adds up to a single cause. Scholars still argue about how much weight to give economics, housing, policing and the national mood of the time, including Black Power and the rhetoric of that summer. What the Detroit case suggests is that high average wages did not protect a city from unrest when the benefits were shared unequally.
After the riot
In the months after July 1967, Detroit’s leaders turned to the business community for help, and the auto companies were prominent in the civic response. Over the following decades the industry’s slow decline, competition from imports and the shift of production away from Detroit made the economic position of the central city much weaker than it had been in the 1960s. The 1967 riot is therefore often placed at a turning point, when the city’s confidence was shaken just before its long economic troubles began. That interpretation should be read as a broad judgment rather than a precise one.