One riot, two riots in the story
The title uses the plural and the word “year”, but the Detroit riot of 1967 was one event, lasting about five days from Sunday 23 July. It is better understood as the second of two great racial disturbances in the city’s twentieth-century history, the first being the riot of June 1943. Looking at both shows what was new in 1967 and what was continuous.
The Great Migration and a crowded city
Detroit’s Black population grew rapidly during the Great Migration, as African Americans left the South for industrial jobs, first in the 1910s and 1920s and then again during the Second World War. The city, which was heavily dependent on the auto industry, became a center of military production, and its population surged. Housing did not keep pace. Black newcomers were largely confined to a few areas, and white workers, many of them also migrants from the South, competed for the same limited housing and jobs.
Tension was already evident before the riot. In 1942, white residents protested and picketed when the federal government planned to place Black tenants in the Sojourner Truth housing project, and violence broke out when the first families tried to move in. Earlier in June 1943, white workers at a Packard plant walked out over the promotion of a few Black employees, a so-called hate strike, and there were disputes at other factories.
June 1943
On Sunday 20 June 1943, a hot day, fights broke out between Black and white people at the Belle Isle park and then spread. Rumors about alleged attacks circulated, and by night crowds had formed in the city. White mobs attacked Black people on and near Woodward Avenue, while Black crowds in the Paradise Valley area attacked white-owned businesses. Thirty-four people were killed, according to the commonly cited count, 25 of them Black and nine white. Many hundreds were injured and thousands arrested.
President Franklin Roosevelt sent in federal troops on 21 June, and order was restored on 22 June. A widely noted feature of the 1943 riot was the role of the police: of the Black victims, a large share were killed by police officers, and critics at the time argued that the police were more willing to confront Black rioters than white ones. Many accounts describe white mobs being treated more leniently, and the great majority of those arrested were Black. Civil rights organizations, including the NAACP, criticized the handling of the events. The riot also took place during wartime and was a source of concern for the federal government, which worried about its effect on production.
Responses in the 1940s and the 1960s
After 1943 the city set up a mayor’s interracial committee and later a Commission on Community Relations, and in the following decades it built a record of relatively progressive racial politics, including the election of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 with strong support from Black voters. Still, the underlying patterns of segregated housing and unequal policing persisted, and the fears of the 1940s lived on in white neighborhoods and Black neighborhoods alike. Detroit’s civil rights movement was strong, with activity by the NAACP, churches, unions and leaders such as the Reverend C. L. Franklin and the Reverend Albert Cleage, and Detroit hosted a major civil rights march in June 1963.
When the riot broke out in 1967, many older residents remembered 1943. Officials said, in effect, that they hoped to avoid a repeat.
How the two riots differed
The two events share some features, such as police conduct and a sense of grievance, but they differ in important ways.
- Who fought whom: in 1943 the violence was largely between white and Black residents, with white mobs very active. In 1967 the disorder was mostly confined to Black neighborhoods and involved looting, arson and conflict with police and troops, and white and Black participants were both reported among looters.
- Targets: in 1943 people were attacked on the street because of their race. In 1967 the main destruction was of property, much of it commercial.
- Scale: 1967 caused 43 deaths, compared with 34 in 1943, and many more fires and arrests.
- Response: in 1943 federal troops arrived after a day; in 1967 the decision took longer and became politically controversial, and the troops were part of a larger force.
- Police: in both cases the police were criticized for their use of force and for their relationship to Black residents. In 1967 the department was still overwhelmingly white.
The long line
The comparison appealed to commentators at the time. The Kerner Commission described repeated waves of urban disorder in American cities, and the long hot summer of 1967 made it plain that the pattern had not ended. Between the two Detroit riots had come others, such as the Harlem riot of 1964. Historians sometimes use Detroit as an example of how a city that tried to address racial tension after one riot still faced a larger one a generation later. One should be careful not to treat the later riot as inevitable, but the earlier one shows that the 1967 conditions, including crowding, job competition and distrust of the police, were not new.