July 23, 1967: Riots break out in Detroit, over racial injustice. There were 43 deaths, and over 700 injuries. In terms of property damage, and long-term effects, it was the most devastating race riot in American history.
There had, of course, been racial disturbances in the years leading up to this. Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, except that wasn't the civil rights demonstrators doing the rioting, it was the police with their response. In 1964, New York's Harlem, and North Philadelphia. In 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles. In 1966, the East Side of Cleveland and the West Side of Chicago.
Detroit had previously been stricken by race riots in 1919 and 1943. And it wasn't the only city stricken by race riots in July 1967. The one in Newark, 2 weeks later, had 26 deaths.
And those weren't the only cities stricken that Summer. In June, there were riots in Boston's Roxbury, Tampa's Central Park, Cincinnati's Avondale, Atlanta's Dixie Hills, and Buffalo's East Side. In July, in between Newark and Detroit, North Minneapolis broke out. At the same time as Detroit, possibly "inspired" by it, 60 miles to the south, Toledo, Ohio. After these, the West Side of Milwaukee.
It may have been a "Summer of Love" in San Francisco, but, in so many other places, it was "The Long Hot Summer" and "The Year of Living Dangerously." And it was all because of the lingering effects of what America's white aristocracy had done to black people.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission released a report saying that it had resulted in an America that was "two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal." The Commission's survey found that, prior to the riot, 30 percent of people living within city limits were black, but 93 percent of Detroit policemen were white, 45 percent of those working in black neighborhoods were "extremely anti-Negro," and another 34 percent were "prejudiced." So that's 79 percent, 4 out of every 5.
Detroit was a proud city. It was the home of the American auto industry, and the home of the United Auto Workers, making it the de facto capital of the American labor movement. It was proud of its sports achievements: The Tigers of Ty Cobb, Hank Greenberg, and now Al Kaline; the Lions of Dutch Clark and Bobby Layne and Doak Walker; the Red Wings of Larry Aurie and Gordie Howe; and boxers like Stanley Ketchel, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Buster Mathis.
Its music scene was powerful: Even before Berry Gordy Jr. founded Motown Records in 1959, it was a flashpoint, with white singers like Margaret Whiting and Johnnie Ray, and black singers like Billie Holiday, Big Joe Turner, Dinah Washington, Jackie Wilson, Etta James, Della Reese and B.B. King.
On a Yankee roadtrip to Detroit, Mickey Mantle, who lived in Dallas during the offseason, met with Dallas native Layne, in the process of quarterbacking the Lions to 3 NFL Championships in the 1950s, and he introduced Mantle to the place that had made Ray, Reese and other singers famous, the Flame Show Bar.
The Flame didn't last long, only running from 1949 to 1963. Outside Michigan, it's best known from a mention in former Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton's book Ball Four. Bouton wrote of how Mantle told him and some other younger Yankees to "meet me at the Flame Lounge," and when they got there, in this already-decaying, now-black neighborhood, and got in, the black maître d' -- paid off by Mantle, so he was in on the joke -- said, "Mickey Mantle? He don't come in here!" and laughed.
Within 8 years, by the time of the riot, Gordy had made so many of his performers legends, including The Supremes (with Diana Ross), The Temptations, The Miracles (with Smokey Robinson), Mary Wells, Marvin Gaye, Martha & The Vandellas, The Four Tops, and a teenager going by the name of Stevie Wonder.
And the city's club scene, and that of the nearby University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, made it good for non-Motown rock acts: Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels had already debuted, while such acts as Bob Seger, Iggy Pop and The MC5 (Motor City Five) soon would.
But all was not well. The city always had a crime problem. During Prohibition (1920-33), its status as a border city (a bend in the Detroit River, between Lake Huron and Lake Erie, makes it the only place where you can cross from north to south and go from America to Canada, with islands where one could rest and hide from the law for a few hours) made it a place for bootleggers, to try to get liquor from Canada (including highly-regarded Canadian whiskey) into America. Due to the passage of time, most people only know the Purple Gang from a line in Elvis Presley's song "Jailhouse Rock," but it was real, a Jewish gang that ran bootlegging in Michigan.
The big thing in Detroit crime in early 1967, if you asked the Detroit Police Department, was prostitution in black neighborhoods. They especially didn't like that many black hookers had white customers. If there's one thing a racist hates more than a black person achieving anything, it's that achievement being sex with a white person, especially if it results in a child: "Race-mixing."
On July 1, a prostitute was killed, and rumors spread that the police had shot her. The police said that she was murdered by local pimps. Both stories were believable. Whatever the truth was, the DPD didn't seem to mind that the locals thought they were the guilty ones. The DPD used "Big 4 Squads," a.k.a. "Tac Squads" (short for "Tactical"), each made up of four police officers, to patrol Detroit neighborhoods, and such squads were used to combat solicitation.
Black residents felt police raids of after-hours drinking clubs were racially biased actions. Since the 1920s, such clubs had become important parts of the city's social life for black citizens. Although they started with Prohibition, they continued because of discrimination against black people in service at many Detroit bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues. As with white ethnic bars, and also gay bars, people felt safer when their own people were running their places.
On the overnight of Saturday into Sunday, July 22 to 23, at 3:45 AM, the police raided an unlicensed weekend drinking club at the United Community League for Civic Action, at 9125 12th Street. They found 82 people celebrating the return of a pair of local Vietnam War veterans. Apparently, these black men having served their country wasn't good enough for these white cops, and they arrested all 82 people.
This led the doorman, William Walter Scott Jr. -- according to the memoir of his son, William III -- to throw a bottle at an officer. This apparently inspired people around the club to start looting an adjacent clothing score. Since it was a Sunday morning, the DPD's request for help from the Wayne County Sheriff's Department, the Michigan State Police and the Michigan Army National Guard took a while to be heard.
The first major fire broke out the following mid-afternoon, in a grocery store at 12th and Atkinson. Soon, word reached downtown. Martha and The Vandellas were performing at a Motown Revue at the Fox Theater. Lead singer Martha Reeves was informed, and she asked people to leave the theater quietly.
A crowd of 34,623 was at Tiger Stadium, watching the Tigers play a doubleheader against the Yankees. Willie Horton, the Tigers' African-American left fielder, born in Appalachian Virginia but raised in Detroit, a graduate of the city's Northwestern High School, left after the 2nd game, kept his uniform on in order to be more easily recognizable, drove to the riot area, and got up on top of his car. But he couldn't get people to stop destroying property and looting stores. He tried to be a hero, but his own people wouldn't let him.
Mayor Jerome Cavanagh called a citywide curfew from 9:00 PM to 5:30 AM, prohibiting sales of alcohol and firearms. (Good luck with that.) On Monday the 24th, Cavanaugh, until now a fairly popular Irish Catholic who was planning on running for Governor against the incumbent Republican, George Romney, in 1970, was reluctant to ask Romney for State assistance. Now, he had no choice.
The partisan nonsense went further up. Romney, who was already planning to run against President Lyndon Johnson the next year (in the end, neither was still in the race in April 1968), called LBJ and asked for federal troops. LBJ told him that, legally, he couldn't do that unless Romney first declared a "state of insurrection." He did, and LBJ sent the troops.
As usually happens in situations like this, the rioters ended up wrecking their own neighborhoods, hurting their own people more than they stuck it to "Whitey" or "The Man." One black merchant said, "You were going to get looted no matter what color you were." John Conyers, then a young black Congressman whose District included the hardest-hit area, got a bullhorn, and said, "We're with you! But, please! This is not the way to do things! Please go back to your homes!" But the crowd responded by throwing rocks and bottles at his car.
The tide didn't turn until Wednesday the 26th, and the rioting didn't stop until Thursday the 27th. Federal troops were finally able to leave on Friday the 28th. It's been said that 10,000 people participated in the riots, 7,200 were arrested (most with no previous criminal record), 1,189 were injured (including 134 firemen who were shot at while trying to put fires out), and 43 were dead: 33 black, 10 white.
Property losses ranged from $40 to 45 million (about $325 to $366 million in 2022 money), 2,509 businesses reported damage, 412 buildings were damaged enough that they couldn't be saved and had to be demolished, and 388 families were left homeless.
Cavanaugh was just 39, and had easily been elected in 1961 (only 33) and re-elected in 1965. He had actively worked with civil rights leaders, both local and national. Unlike his fellow Irish Catholic, the imperious Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, who saw Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a public-relations threat, Jerry Cavanaugh had welcomed him to his city. Comparisons were already being made to another young urban Irish Catholic, the late President John F. Kennedy.
Instead, everything fell apart for Cavanaugh. He said, "Today, we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough." Shortly afterward, in events probably unconnected to the riot, his wife Mary Helen left him, and they were divorced the next year.
Cavanaugh did not run for a 3rd term in 1969. He ran for Governor in 1974, but lost the Primary, and never ran for office again. He died of a heart attack in 1979, only 51 years old. Two of his sons were elected Wayne County Commissioners, another to the State House of Representatives, and another served on the State Court of Appeals.
Councilman Mel Ravitz said the riot "deepened the fears of many whites, and raised the militancy of many blacks." The desire of white people for "law and order" led to the election of Roman Gribbs, Sheriff of Wayne County, as Mayor in 1969.
He created a secret and elite police unite: "Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets," or STRESS. It actively ignored white criminals, and focused on entrapment in black communities. In their 1st 30 months, this one police department unit killed 20 people, more than any other entire police department in the entire country. Furious, in 1973, blacks and their white allies shamed Gribbs into not running for re-election, and elected State Senator Coleman Young to be the city's 1st black Mayor.
Young did his best -- as with Newark's 1st black Mayor, Ken Gibson, not always within the law -- and served as Mayor for 20 years, as "white flight" turned some Detroit neighborhoods into "ghost towns" as much as the riot did in the black neighborhood where it happened.
Things went from bad to worse. In 1999, having parents who grew up in Newark, and still living near that city, I visited Detroit for the 1st time. It never looked to me like Newark had come back much from their riot, 2 weeks before Detroit's. But seeing Detroit showed me how much Newark had come back, because I could see that Detroit hadn't. On a Saturday afternoon, hot but with no rain, downtown Detroit was practically a ghost town. In his memoir, Mayor Young wrote:
Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The rebellion put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money.
The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the riot, totaling twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion, the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969.
In the 1950 Census, Detroit's population had peaked at 1,849,568. By 1967, it was about 1.6 million. By 1980, it was 1.2 million. By 1990, a shade over 1 million. In 2000, 950,000. In 2010, 713,000. Today, July 23, 2022, with the results of the 2020 Census not yet in (delayed due to COVID), it is estimated at 670,000 -- just 36 percent of what it was at its peak, and 56 percent of what it was at the time of the riot. In 2013, Detroit became the 1st major American city, although it worked its way out of it the next year.
The Tigers just missed winning the American League Pennant in 1967, and rebounded from that to win the World Series in 1968. It was a tremendous lift for the city, but it was fleeting. Although the various teams had their moments, there wouldn't be another title until 1984, when the Tigers won it again. The Pistons won NBA titles in 1989 and '90, and the Red Wings recovered from a 42-year drought to reach 6 Stanley Cup Finals, winning 4, from 1995 to 2009.
But despite 2 more Pennants since 1984, the Tigers haven't won the World Series since. And the Lions haven't won, or even been in, an NFL Championship Game, under any name, since 1957. The Tigers built Comerica Park at the northern edge of downtown, across from the Fox Theater, in 2000. The Lions built Ford Field next-door to that in 2002. And in 2017, 50 years after the riot, the Red Wings and Pistons moved into Little Caesars Arena, a 5-minute walk away from the Tigers and the Lions.
But such facilities only seem to be built for white people coming into the city from the suburbs. The Detroit metropolitan area's population has remained steady: It's the suburbs who take on people (white) while the city loses them. The city still suffers, and makes the fictional Gotham City, home of Batman in DC Comics -- in both desolation and crime, blue- and white-collar -- look like Superman's Metropolis by comparison.
UPDATE: The Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Detroit and Windsor, opened on July 24, 2026, 59 years after the riot. By that point, the population of Detroit was estimated at about 650,000, having bottomed out in 2022, at 631,000, but now having risen for 3 years in a row.
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July 23, 1967 was a Sunday. Actor Philip Seymour Hoffman was born.
It was the off-season for the NFL, the NBA and the NHL. In Major League Baseball, all 20 teams were in action, including some playing Sunday doubleheaders, including in the city in question:
* The New York Yankees played a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers at Tiger Stadium. The Yankees won the opener, 4-2. Joe Pepitone hit a home run off Mickey Lolich, in support of Mel Stottlemyre.
The Tigers won the nightcap, 7-3. Bill Robinson hit a home run for the Yankees, but Willie Horton proved more successful that day inside the ballpark than out, hitting a home run off Fritz Peterson, as did Jim Landis. Mickey Mantle went 1-for-3 in the 1st game, and 0-for-3 in the 2nd.
People were worried that the riot might damage Tiger Stadium. It didn't, and it helped that the Tigers then went on a roadtrip.
* The New York Mets beat the Los Angeles Dodgers, 4-1 at Shea Stadium.
* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.
* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Washington Senators, 7-3 at District of Columbia Stadium in Washington. (It was renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in 1969.) The O's scored 4 runs in the top of the 11th inning.
* A doubleheader was split at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The Houston Astros won the 1st game 8-5, and the Pittsburgh Pirates won the 2nd game, 15-2.
* The Boston Red Sox split a doubleheader with the Cleveland Indians at Clevelane Municipal Stadium. On their way to their "Impossible Dream" Pennant, the BoSox won the 1st game 8-5, and the 2nd game 5-1.
* A doubleheader was split at Wrigley Field in Chicago. The San Francisco Giants won the 1st game 5-2, and the Chicago Cubs won the 2nd game, 6-3.
* The Chicago White Sox swept a doubleheader from the Kansas City Athletics at Kansas City Municipal Stadium. The ChiSox won the opener 8-4, and the nightcap 1-0. Hoyt Wilhelm got the last 4 outs for Gary Peters on a 6-hit shutout.
* The St. Louis Cardinals swept a doubleheader from the Atlanta Braves at Busch Memorial Stadium. The Redbirds won the 1st game 3-1, and the 2nd game 8-3.
* The California Angels beat the Minnesota Twins, 2-1 at Anaheim Stadium. (It's now named Angel Stadium of Anaheim.
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