There’s been a lot of debate over whether to call what happened in July, 1967, a “riot” or a “rebellion.” I tended to prefer the term “riot,” for two reasons.
First, to my way of thinking, a rebellion, whether successful or not, has a definite and clear political purpose. Second, almost nobody except the radical intellectual Grace Boggs called it anything other than a “riot” in 1967, or for many years afterwards.
But perhaps the best definition I’ve ever seen came from a very savvy man who was a state senator at the time, who was there, and said this:
“The explosion of 1967, unlike the one (in 1943) was not a race riot. To be sure, most of the participants were black, and there were unmistakable racial implications … (but) a cameraman took pictures of the looting of an A&P store on Trumbull, and there was racial unity up and down the … aisles.
“Blacks and whites were helping each other carry out cases of canned goods in complete harmony … it could be argued that the rebellion, specifically the pillaging part of it, was as much about consumerism as about race, a revolt of underprivileged, overcrowded, hot and irritable citizens who were fed up …”
That man was one Coleman Alexander Young, who would become Detroit’s first black mayor. In his autobiography, Hard Stuff, he added this:
“If the insurrection of Detroit in 1967 must be called a riot, let it be recorded as a police riot, “by which he meant a riot against the police. He added, “This is not to say that the citizens of Detroit were justified on destroying their own community, or that the police should bear all the blame, only that there was a principal object of the rebels’ vengeance, and …it was the white man in the blue uniform.”
I’ve quoted Young at length because I think he was largely right; he left out only the oafish behavior of the National Guard, many of whom were from upstate and knew nothing of large cities and even less of African Americans.
Interestingly, National Guard troops weren’t involved in putting down the 1943 riot, because they had nearly all been called up for the war. That riot was actually technically started by a couple angry young black men, but it turned into a war of the “cops against the colored,” with most of the 24 blacks who perished shot to death by the police.
None of the nine dead whites were shot by the police. Detroit in 1943 was a radically different place from today, a place where the races not only hated but didn’t have the slightest understanding of each other. Packard plant workers went on a wildcat strike because Negroes had been promoted to jobs on the assembly line.
One told a reporter that the white workers felt they all would get venereal diseases just from touching the same machinery as blacks. This was also a world where the vast majority of adults hadn’t been born in Detroit, but came there to work in the auto plants.
More than three hundred thousand were born in other countries, ten times as many as today. Well, today Detroit’s police force is two-thirds black, as are the vast majority of its officials. There is a large, desperate and possibly growing underclass, but their resentments don’t seem to be fixed on race.
Detroit today is not the same place it was either time it exploded. That’s not to say some kind of mass violence couldn’t happen again, only that it would be different.
Different, but perhaps an even greater tragedy.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
