THE DETRIOT RIOTS OF 1967

An explanation to why one of the worst race riots in

history started

Matthew J. Croft
 1

Matt Croft
Research paper
5/10/17
The Detroit Riots of 1967
Anthony Fierimote, a former Detroit police officer who took part in the raid of the Blind

Pig tells his tale of what the beginning of the night of July, 23rd 1967. He begins by explaining

that he had received a tip about a hot party on 12th street. He then first he sent undercover police

to attempt to purchase illegal drugs from a party on 12th street. After the officers reported not

getting in he tells they them to wait until some young ladies had walked in and to go with

them. After drugs were purchased Fierimote ordered for the door to be broken down, however it

could not so they had a firemen break down the door with an axe. Once they had announce the

police were there everyone settle down the people began to throw cue balls and chairs at the

police officers on scene. Once the officers were back on the street with the first set of criminals

the people began to throw more objects out of the window which eventually drew a crowd.

FIerimote then accompanied the first set of arrestees to the station and told his lieutenant that he

needed to get down there because it was starting to become a bigger situation.1 This paved the

way for another five days of gruesome rioting in which 43 people were killed, of whom were

mostly African American.

While much has been published on why these riots occurred and the aftermath that came

after it, many believe that the cause of these riots is a combination of perpetual poverty, low

income housing, and systematic abuse by the police. While I believe all of these have played a

1
Detroit Historical Society, Detroit 1967: Oral History Interview with Anthony Fierimonte, Ph.D, accessed May 4,
2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTGZjZmPYg.
 2

role in why these riots started, I think that there was a much larger socioeconomic issue that

contributed to not only those 3 issues, but is what really caused the riots to happen.

One major argument that can be seen across research done by Thomas Sugrue and Bill

McGraw, on this topic was that extreme poverty led to the start of these riots. Starting in the

1960s and continuing over into today, unemployment has been high in the city of Detroit. This

rise in unemployment from the 1950s which is considered to be the golden area in Detroit, is

due to the city deindustrialized which caused unemployment to sky rocket. A large movement of

people out of the city and into suburbs took a lot of the jobs either with them, after this

companies simply had to move away due to not having enough workers. In 1970 blacks had an

average income of 4,354 dollars, nearly three quarters of what whites earned at 5,889 dollars.2

While it is easy to see why African Americans would be mad about this because not only are

they poor from no longer having the high paying industrial jobs, but their housing was awful

from a systematic segregation of housing that also took place.

One of the first people who looked into this conflict in history was historian Thomas

Sugrue. In his book The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Post War Detroit

his thesis is trying to understand the true origins of problems cities both currently face and faced

during the civil rights movement, almost all these issues started after World War II. Sugrue

believes that there was a combination of four things that really caused the decline of these

Northern industrial cities such as Detroit such as race, economics, politics, and even just the time

period that they happened in. Sugrue dedicates much of his book into explaining how the historic

2
Bill McGraw, Poverty and Joblessness in Detroit, Fuel for 67 Riot, Even Worse Today, MLive.com, accessed May
11, 2017, http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2016/06/poverty_and_joblessness_fuel_f.html.
 3

discrimination of employment for African Americans. He states that Residents of high poverty

areas were twice as likely as the average Detroiter to be unemployed.3

Poverty leads to poorer social opportunities this includes things such as housing and the

ability to move. While poverty naturally leads to worse standards of living housing in Detroit had

other issues as well. Whites pretty much lived in the nice areas and if an African American

family or any minority was to move into one of the predominantly white areas they caught a lot

of trouble for it. Things such as NIGGER have been spry painted on garages and the KKK

even made threats to burn down minorities homes if they moved into somewhere they werent

welcome. Neighborhoods were classified by race and income, however there was also

neighborhoods that were seen as lower class because non-whites lived there.

One author Sidney Fine, who wrote a study called Violence in the Model City: The

Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967. In this study Fine first

provides two worlds in which the first of these enjoyed the publicity and national recognition

that was gained under Mayor Jerome P. Cavanaghs innovated efforts to attempt to improve race

relations in the city of Detroit, the second of these worlds however was much bleaker. Fine goes

into how the second of these worlds experienced something quite different than the first with the

socioeconomic gap growing between African Americans and whites.4 This gap in almost all

areas of life for African Americans doesnt seem like it could get much worse, however it did

because the government also seemed to be in on it as well because they up rooted entire

3
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Princeton Studies in
American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives (Princeton University Press, 2005).
4
Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cacanagh Administriation, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of
1967 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).
 4

neighborhoods by calling them Urban Renewal projects which aimed to get rid of blight which

had begun to consume the city.

Urban renewal projects that included a major highway after World War II these projects

only became worse for African Americans. This allowed for African Americans to become even

more confined in their sectioned neighborhoods because of these redevelopment projects that

targeted mostly black ghetto areas. 5 One of the areas that was hit especially hard was an area

called black bottom which was home to many historic African American homes and held a lot of

cultural significance to the people that lived there. While housing was a big problem for African

Americans which there could still be a case made for the fact that it hasnt changed today, neither

has the abuse seen by police against blacks across the country. While much research has gone

into finding out what started this riot, one argument on how police brutality against African

Americans cannot be ignored.

There has been a long history of police violence towards African Americans in the United

States long before these riots even took place. Many people including Traquina Quarks Emeka

who writes in her article on the Detroit Riot of 1967 that Police brutality and racial profiling

were ordinary occurrences in Detroits African American neighborhoods.6 The tensions

between the police, which was nearly all white, and African American neighborhoods allowed

for an almost perfect atmosphere for a riot to begin. According to author Sidney Fine lower

5
Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
6
Traqina Quarks Emeka, Detroit Riot of 1967 | American History, Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed May 4, 2017,
https://www.britannica.com/event/Detroit-Riot-of-1967.
 5

socioeconomic standing combined the deep-seated inter-racial tension between African

Americans and the nearly all white police force helped to start this riot.7

While many people believed that the riot started on the streets 12th and Claremont

because the police broke up a large party at a place called the Blind Pig, this is only the origin of

the riots not why they started. Police had been targeting blacks in Detroit for a long time and

these riots were a response to it at least thats what many people think. The police force at the

time of the riots was 93% white while blacks accounted for more than 30% of the population of

the city at the time.8 This shows an under representation of blacks in the police force. People

really did feel this underrepresentation and the mistreatment of African Americans by the police

at the time, this combined with the extraordinary presence of young African Americans who

knew all about the civil rights movement at the time set up a breeding ground for disaster.

Harlan Hahn and Joe Feagin go more into depth about the issue of urban confrontation

from the predominantly white police force and expanding African American communities in

their article Riot Precipitating Police Practices: Attitudes in Urban Ghettos. They provide an

example of a survey that was taken in Detroit in 1965; just two years before the riots, which

results disclosed that 58 percent of African Americans there felt that law enforcement was not

fair.9 What is clear here is that the disapproval of the way that police acted towards African

Americans. This mistreatment was often times reported to be about three major things which

consist of petty harassment, physical brutality, and a lack of patrolling in the often times crime

7
Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cacanagh Administriation, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of
1967.
8
husseinbazzi, The Downfall of Detroit: White Flight and the 1967 Race Riots, Husseinbazzi, November 12, 2013,
https://husseinbazzi.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/the-downfall-of-detroit-white-flight-and-the-1967-race-riots/.
9
Harlan Hahn and Joe R. Feagin, Riot-Precipitating Police Practices: Attitudes in Urban Ghettos, Phylon (1960-)
31, no. 2 (1970): 18393, doi:10.2307/273723.
 6

ridden ghettos that African Americans were almost forced to live in. This brutality didnt stop

there however, during the riots were 43 people were killed.

Author Albert Bergesen who wrote Race Riots of 1967: An Analysis of police violence in

Detroit and Newark, gives some shocking statistics that during these riots nearly 69% of the

violence that occurred was by officials such as the police. Roughly 29 people were killed by

officials shooting at individuals, cars, apartments, and looters. 10. This violence from the police

and other officials such as the National Guard caused there to be a resentment from African

Americans which turned into a confrontation during these riots. All officials had issues

responding to these riots because they were pinned down by sniper fire. This caused more

problems for people at night because if a light was to be turned on the police would shoot it out

in order to protect their officers.

Overall the conclusion on why these riots started is still unclear however we do know that

things such as extreme poverty, unequal housing opportunities, and police violence towards

blacks all played a role in the start of the rioting. What we do know is that this is still to this day

one of the worse race riots in history, which took 43 lives and caused over 50 million dollars in

damages. African Americans also to this day still deal with these problems of police violence

and socioeconomic discrimination as well, yet they are not discussed because its an ugly truth

that our system could allow for this to still be occurring in our nation. One thing left unanswered

is whether or not the government had more responsibility to protect the African Americans in

Detroit from slipping into socioeconomic failure and to be more mindful of the way the police

force acted?

10
Albert Bergesen, Race Riots of 1967: An Analysis of Police Violence in Detroit and Newark,
Journal of Black Studies 12, no. 3 (1982): 26174.
 7

Bibliography

Bergesen, Albert. Race Riots of 1967: An Analysis of Police Violence in Detroit and Newark.
Journal of Black Studies 12, no. 3 (1982): 26174.
Bill McGraw. Poverty and Joblessness in Detroit, Fuel for 67 Riot, Even Worse Today.
MLive.com. Accessed May 11, 2017.
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2016/06/poverty_and_joblessness_fuel
_f.html.
Detroit Historical Society. Detroit 1967: Oral History Interview with Anthony Fierimonte, Ph.D.
Accessed May 4, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTGZjZmPYg.
Hahn, Harlan, and Joe R. Feagin. Riot-Precipitating Police Practices: Attitudes in Urban
Ghettos. Phylon (1960-) 31, no. 2 (1970): 18393. doi:10.2307/273723.
husseinbazzi. The Downfall of Detroit: White Flight and the 1967 Race Riots. Husseinbazzi,
November 12, 2013. https://husseinbazzi.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/the-downfall-of-
detroit-white-flight-and-the-1967-race-riots/.
Sidney Fine. Violence in the Model City: The Cacanagh Administriation, Race Relations, and the
Detroit Riot of 1967. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989.
Thomas J. Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative
Perspectives. Princeton University Press, 2005.
Traqina Quarks Emeka. Detroit Riot of 1967 | American History. Encyclopedia Britannica.
Accessed May 4, 2017. https://www.britannica.com/event/Detroit-Riot-of-1967.