Posted on 07/23/2007 9:39:39 AM PDT by yankeedame
The 12th Street Riot in Detroit began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967. Vice squad officers executed a raid at a blind pig on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount on the city's near westside.
The confrontation with the patrons there evolved into one of the deadliest and most destructive riots in modern U.S. history, lasting five days and far surpassing the 1943 riot the city endured. Before the end, the state and federal governments, under order of then President Lyndon B. Johnson, sent in National Guard and U.S. Army troops and the result was forty-three dead, 467 injured, over 7,200 arrests and more than 2,000 buildings burned down....
Background
The seeds of the 12th Street riot were planted in the extraordinary growth of the auto industry that placed the city at the industrial center of the nation.
The availability of high-paying and unskilled work in auto plants attracted many from the south, both black and white, who brought their often conflicting cultures into the community. In 1943, racial tensions between blacks and whites broke out into open riot as each competed for wartime jobs and limited housing.
By 1967, black residents lacked adequate housing due to lending practices, misguided urban renewal, and deed restrictions. Detroit had the highest home ownership rate among black people in the nation, but urban renewal projects bulldozed some black neighborhoods to make way for freeway construction.
In order to construct Interstate 75, "Black Bottom" (Paradise Valley) was demolished, displacing most residents to high-rise low-income project housing or already-crowded neighborhoods. Black Bottom was the focus of the black community, and its loss resulted in racial tensions due to the loss of community as well as housing.
Lending practices by banks, such as red-lining, in addition to deed restrictions in local communities, denied blacks the ability to move to many neighborhoods, including most of the Detroit suburbs. Many homes that were privately owned were bought on land contract at high interest rates and very short foreclosure schedules.
Blacks were trapped and confined to areas (often undesirable) that were not sufficient to hold the displaced population, and by 1967, the neighborhood around 12th Street had a population density that was twice the city average. Black schools in the city were overcrowded as well as underfunded.
In the 1960s, Detroit's total population was dropping due to white and business flight although the black population was still increasing rapidly due to continued immigration from the South. Detroit was losing over 20,000 residents a year by 1966, most of them white..., Detroit lost around 240,000 residents between 1950 and 1970. By 1967 the city government was in deep financial trouble as the property tax base dropped. Whites could escape the problems of Detroit, but blacks were denied loans and, in some cases, purchases in the suburbs.
In 1967, the Detroit Police Department was predominantly white, ... had a reputation among the black residents of Detroit for harassment and brutality. Officers verbally degraded youths, and those that could not produce proper identification were often arrested or worse. Several questionable shootings and beatings of blacks by officers were reported by the local press in the years before 1967.
After the riot, a Detroit Free Press survey showed that residents reported police brutality as the number one problem they faced in the period leading up to the riot....
Twelve days before the raid on the blind pig, Newark, New Jersey had suffered through six days of rioting, ending less than five days before the Detroit riot began. Conditions in Newark were much worse for blacks than conditions were in Detroit. Detroit's rate of black homeownership was the highest in the nation; Newark's was much lower.
Chronology
In the early hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers expected to find only two individuals in the blind pig, but instead there were 82 people celebrating the return of two local veterans from the war in Vietnam.
Despite the large number, police decided to arrest everyone present.
A crowd soon gathered around the establishment, protesting as patrons were led away.
After the last police car left, a group of angry black males, who had observed the incident, began breaking the windows of the adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale rioting began throughout the neighborhood, which continued into Monday, July 24, 1967, and for the next few days.
Michigan Governor George Romney and President Lyndon Johnson initially disagreed about the legality of sending in federal troops. Johnson said he could not send federal troops in without Romney declaring a "state of insurrection". Romney was reluctant to make that declaration for fear that doing so would relieve insurance companies of their obligations to reimburse policyholders for the damage being done.
The violence escalated throughout Monday, July 24, resulting in some 483 fires, 231 incidents reported per hour, and 1800 arrests. Looting and arson were widespread.
Snipers took shots at firefighters who were attempting to fight the fires... the Detroit and Michigan forces were unable to keep the peace.
On Monday, U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan), who was against Federal troop deployment, attempted to ease tensions but was unsuccessful. Reportedly, Conyers stood on the hood of the car and shouted through a bullhorn, "We're with you! But, please! This is not the way to do things! Please go back to your homes!"
But the crowd refused to listen....Conyers' car was pelted with rocks and bottles, one of them hitting a nearby cop. According to reports, as Conyers climbed down from the hood of the car, he remarked to a reporter in disgust, "You try to talk to those people and they'll knock you into the middle of next year."
...Shortly before midnight on Monday, July 24, President Johnson authorized use of Federal troops by using a law from 1795, which stated that the President may call in armed forces whenever there is an insurrection in any state against the government.
The 82nd Airborne had earlier been positioned at nearby Selfridge Air Force Base in suburban Macomb County, along with National Guard troops who were federalized at that time. Starting at 1:30 AM Tuesday July 25, some 8,000 National Guardsmen were deployed to quell the disorder. Later their number would be augmented with 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne, and 360 Michigan State Police.
There is some discussion that the deployment of troops incited more violence, although the riot ended within 48 hours of their deployment. National Guard troops were engaged in firefights with locals, resulting in deaths both to locals and the troops. Tanks and machine guns were used in the effort to keep the peace.
Film footage and photos shown internationally were of a city on fire, with tanks and combat troops in firefights in the streets, sealing Detroit's reputation for decades to come.
By Thursday, July 27, order had returned to the city to the point where ammunition was taken from the National Guardsmen stationed in the riot area, and bayonets ordered sheathed. Troop withdrawal began on Friday, July 28, the day of the last major fire in the riot. The Army troops were completely withdrawn by Saturday, July 29....
The toll
Over the period of five days, forty-three people died, of whom 33 were black. The other damages were calculated as follows:
467 injured: 182 civilians, 167 Detroit police officers, 83 Detroit firefighters, 17 National Guard troops, 16 State Police officers, 3 U.S. Army soldiers. 7,231 arrested: 6,528 adults, 703 juveniles; 6,407 blacks, 824 whites. The youngest, 4; the oldest, 82. Half of those arrested had no criminal record. Three percent of those arrested went to trial; half of them were acquitted.
2,509 stores looted or burned, 388 families homeless or displaced and 412 buildings burned or damaged enough to be demolished. Dollar losses from arson and looting ranged from $40 million to $80 million.
Contrary to popular belief, black-owned businesses were not spared. One of the first stores looted in Detroit was Hardy's drug store, owned by blacks, and known for filling prescriptions on credit. Detroit's leading black-owned clothing store was burned, as was one of the city's best-loved black restaurants. In the wake of the riots, a black merchant noted "you were going to get looted no matter what color you were."
...the disturbances are thought to have accelerated white flight (and also middle-class black flight) to the surrounding suburbs ...while the city still had a white majority in 1967, it would gain a black majority by the early 1970s....
The aftermath
An estimated 10,000 participated, with an estimated 100,000 gathering to watch. Thirty-six hours of rioting later, 43 were dead, 33 of them black, 17 of those by police action. More than 7,200 were arrested, mostly black....
12th Street was renamed "Rosa Parks Boulevard" in 1976.
What the heck’s a “blind pig”?
And Detroit never recovered...
Apparently a local slang for a speakeasy or illegal bar.
During prohibition, Detroit apparently had a couple thousand.
I was living in the 8 Mile/Kelly area in 1967; I well remember LBJ going on national tv that Monday night to announce that federal troops were going in. Johnson seemed most concerned that Governor Romney be shown at fault for failing to keep order.
Romney was expected to run for President against LBJ the next year. He did, but lost the GOP nomination to Nixon after admitting he’d been “brainwashed” by US officials in Vietnam.
Illegal saloon.
I was only about 4 years old, but I remember the riots a little bit. I lived in the suburbs north of Detroit. I remember my dad getting ready to go to work and my mom telling him that since he worked near the riot area, there was no way he was going in that day.
I also remember driving down the freeway with my mom and getting passed by a tank. It had rubber wheels. Pretty cool to a 4 year old.
For those not versed in urban lingo:
The Detroit Riots of 1967: EventsThe Detroit Riot of 1967 began when police vice squad officers executed a raid on an after hours drinking club or “blind pig” in a predominantly black ...
It was almost as if the Pistons had won the NBA championship.
The worst riot was after the Tigers won the World Series in 1984.
George Romney was finished after the New Hampshire primary. He was the first GOP candidate to drop out.
A pal of mine from High School was in the MI National Guard at the time. His patrol was down around 12th Street. He said he had taken off his helmet because of the oppressive heat and some urban guerrilla beaned him on the back of the head with an empty beer bottle. No Purple Heart.
Well, you destroyed your pig sty, but you still have to live there.
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
"Blind pig" is traditionally said to derive from the nickname of a band of soldiers called the Public Guard serving in Richmond, Virginia, in about 1858. Their militia hats had the initials P.G. on them, the moniker arising because P.G. is a pig without an ‘i,’ and a pig without an ‘eye’ is a ‘blind pig.’ Apparently these soldiers spent a lot of time getting drunk in local taverns, were disliked by the general population, and supposedly the saloons they drank in ended up getting named after them.
Not even close. The 1984 "riot" was nothing more than a few hours of drunken rowdies in a three block area around Tiger Stadium. The '67 riots lasted for days and days and much of the city was in flames. I was only 15 years old but I remember it very well. It was the first summer my parents left me and my 16 year old sister alone for a week while they went up north. Great timing on their part.
I was at Tiger Stadium that day, just a few blocks from ‘ground zero.’ We could see smoke rising into the air above the stadium walls, but had no idea what was happening. Those days, apparently, not many people listened to the game on the radio in the seats, and the Tigers management made no public address announcements as to what was happening
It wasn’t until we returned to our car and turned on the radio that we found out what was taking place.
I was referring to sports-related riots. Of course the 67 and 43 riots were worse.
An estimated 10,000 participated, with an estimated 100,000 gathering to watch. Thirty-six hours of rioting later, 43 were dead, 33 of them black, 17 of those by police action. More than 7,200 were arrested, mostly black....
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I was there, in july 21,22,23,24,25.
Ha Ha 43 dead is a farce.
The national guard doubled up 2men to squad car with 2 detroit police officer for night patrol, shooting out street lights.
on third night of riots, my squad car come upon Dead riotor in the street, we called in for toe tag number and by radio was given 297 toe tag.
In the riot in the 1940’s bodies were dumped down the sewers to handle bodies.
How do I know I was in the squad car.
An estimated 10,000 participated, with an estimated 100,000 gathering to watch. Thirty-six hours of rioting later, 43 were dead, 33 of them black, 17 of those by police action. More than 7,200 were arrested, mostly black....
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I was there, in july 21,22,23,24,25.
Ha Ha 43 dead is a farce.
The national guard doubled up 2men to squad car with 2 detroit police officer for night patrol, shooting out street lights.
on third night of riots, my squad car come upon Dead riotor in the street, we called in for toe tag number and by radio was given 297 toe tag.
In the riot in the 1940’s bodies were dumped down the sewers to handle bodies.
How do I know I was in the squad car.
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