As Black History Month winds down a woman I follow on Twitter/X, Michelle B Young, posted a map with dates of race riots that occurred in cities across the U.S. starting as far back as the Civil War. The first riot I was aware of outside of the one in Detroit that happened in 1967, was the L.A. riots in 1992 after the beating of Rodney King by four police officers and the aftermath of the acquittal of the officers.
My awareness of the L.A. riot was different from the one in Detroit because I was more cognizant of the injustice of the inciting incident, much like the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Both of those atrocities were driven by blatant racism and complete disregard for the humanity of the man at the mercy of those police officers. In 1967, I didn’t know what had started the riot, but more about that a little later in this post.
When Ms. Young posted the map you see above, she issued a challenge to followers to pick a city and do some research to find out more about that riot. I was surprised to see that the first one in Detroit, the city where I was born and raised close by, was in 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
Despite that wording, the proclamation had limits that created confusion and contributed to tensions between races. First, it applied only to states that had seceded from the United States, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. Second, it exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control.
Most importantly, the freedom promised in the proclamation depended on a military victory by the Union. Had the South won, things would go back to the way they were.
In 1863, there was a black community in Detroit comprised of free Blacks who’d migrated there, as well as refugee slaves who had fled the South. Because of it’s proximity to Windsor, Canada, a country that had abolished slavery in 1834, Detroit was a major stopping point of the Underground Railroad. Many of the runaway slaves planned to go into Canada, and about 30,000 to 40,000 of them settled there between 1850 and 1860.
More about the 1863 riot at Wikipedia where I found much of the information for this post.
In Detroit, there was another riot in 1943, that lasted three days from June 20-22. That riot was caused primarily by tensions over a severe housing shortage, competition for jobs between White and Black workers, and the unwillingness of White workers to desegregate factories. The violence caused 34 deaths (25 African American, 9 white) and hundreds of injuries, with 17 Black residents killed by police.
The fighting started on Belle Isle, a small island in the Detroit River, that was, and still is, a recreational place for people to gather to picnic, enjoy water sports, the aquarium, playgrounds, and more. The riot then spread across the city, fueled by false rumors of violence against both Blacks and Whites; the first saying that White people had thrown a Black woman and her baby off the Belle Isle Bridge. The other rumor said that Black men had raped a White woman near the bridge.
There was approximately $2 million in property damage, primarily in the Black district of Paradise Valley, and considered a significant moment in Detroit’s civil rights history, highlighting deep-seated racial injustice.
That injustice didn’t stop and had tensions between Blacks and Whites simmering for years, a major factor in the start of the 1967 riot, which was known as The Rebellion of 1967 or the 12th Street Riot.
In that year, I was a mom caring for a newborn, so I wasn’t as aware of social issues as I had been in college in the early 60s. We lived in a suburb of Detroit and weren’t up on what was happening in the city. It was a miserably hot day in July, and the sultry, humid days and nights wore on people’s nerves.
It was only after doing research for this post that I discovered the inciting incident for that riot – a police raid near midnight on a blind pig at 12th Street and Clairmount. Despite the late hour, the avenue was full of people attempting to stay cool, and, in frustration over the raid and the heat, someone threw a brick at a police car, breaking the back window. Things escalated from there and violence erupted in other parts of the city.
By the end of the first two days, fires and looting were reported across the city. People were armed after stealing guns during the looting, and the city became an urban warzone. Sniper fire created fear in residents and hindered firefighting and policing efforts.
My husband worked downtown Detroit at the central offices of General Motors, and he stayed home from work during the last two days of the riot. Much like the 1943 riot, rumors fueled tensions, and the main one that affected us was that armed Black men were going to come to the Tank Arsenal, which was only two miles from the apartment in which we lived.
Supposedly, the men wanted to acquire a tank, which even then I questioned, but the reality was that there were other armaments within the arsenal complex that they might want. But more alarming to us, was the rumor that our low cost apartment complex might also be a target because of it’s practice of excluding Blacks. The complex, called Kramer Homes Co-operative, had been military housing built by the government for workers at the Tank Arsenal and sold to residents in 1949 to become co-operative housing. But it had a long history of denying Black applicants.
We saw images on the nightly news of the horrible violence in parts of Detroit, and that fueled the fear that if armed Black men made their way down the main street to the arsenal and spread to Kramer Homes, we would all be in danger. It was that fear, whether based on actual fact or not, that had my husband sleeping on the couch with a shotgun at hand.
That’s my main memory of that awful time. Me sleeping upstairs with our baby and him downstairs, maybe praying he wouldn’t have to use that weapon, while fearing that he might have to if the danger came to our front door.
Thinking about all this now, I realize that the same kind of rumor mongering and the spreading of mis-information is still driving relations between factions of Americans today. Not just Black and White, but Left and Right, Christians and non-Christians, Young and Old. It’s just so much faster and easier with social media and instant post and reposting on various platforms.
Whenever I spend a lot of time contemplating all that is wrong in how we act toward each other, from the simplest slight, to a riot, to war, the line from the song by Pete Seeger “Where Have All the Flowers Gone”… “When will they ever learn. When will they ever learn” comes to mind.
I do wonder.
Will we ever learn?