July 1967: Rebellion in Detroit -

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DetroitFrom the Revolutionary Worker,voice of the Revolutionary Com-munist Party, USA, 20 July 1987.

"The club! Those goddamnpeckerwoods are going to raid theclub again!"

A rowdy crowd of about 200 isgathering at 3:30 a.m. Sunday be-side a police paddywagon that hasjust pulled up across from the Unit-ed Community League for CivicAction, on Twelfth nearClairmount.

Originally a Black activist club,the UCLCA was a target of thewhite political machine. When theclub owner was laid off from his jobin the auto plants, he started usingit as a "blind pig," or after-hoursdrinking and gambling joint, in ord-er to survive. The routine policeraids normally netted about twentypeople, just enough to cram into asingle paddywagon.

But tonight, unknown to thecops, there is a party going on fortwo Black GIs just home from Viet-nam. Inside, eight-five peoplecelebrate their safe return.

One of the cops swings a sledge-hammer through the plate glassdoor to get in. Curses volley backand forth between the crowd andthe police. "Go home, whitey. Whydon't you go fuck with whitepeople?"

Club patrons are being hustledinto a paddywagon, their arms

twisted painfully behind theirbacks. The police can hardly believethe number of people inside. It willtake many round trips with the wag-on - about an hour - to haulthem all down to the Tenth Precinctstation.

With each wagonload, the crowdgrows larger and more angry. Soon,some of the onlookers, outraged athow roughly the women are beingarrested, are yelling at the top oftheir lungs. The cops line up in themiddle of the street with their ba-tons ready. "If you stay where youare, no one will get hurt."

But Bill Scott, l9-year-old son ofthe club owner, climbs on top of acar. "Are we going to let these peck-erwood motherfuckers come downhere anytime they want and mess usaround?" "Hell, no!" barks thecrowd.

Someone ducks into an alley tofind a bottle. He aims for a sergeantat the club door; it shatters in frontof the pig's feet. "They're scared!"a man shouts. The cops make fora few people nearby, but the crowdsmerge and force them to retreat.

As the wagon and cop cars pullaway, a hail of bricks and bottlessmashes against them.

A litter basket is hurled throughthe window of a white-owned drug-

store, and then a clothing store.Slowly, people begin to enter andtake what they want.

Against a background of burglaralarms and gleeful laughter, astunned cop yells into his radioreceiver, "All cars stay clear.Repeat. Stay clear of Twelfth Streetarea."

By sunrise, a looted shoestore isin flames. By sundown, the gun bat-tles will begin.

(This scenario is drawn in largepart from Hurt, Baby, Hurt, byWilliam Walter Scott.)

"A spirit of carefree nihilism wastaking hold. To riot and to destroyappeared more and more to becomeends in themselves. Late Sunday af-ternoon it appeared to one observ-er that the young people were'dancing amidst the flames.' "(Kerner Commission Report)

Bill Scott would later set down onpaper the elation he felt when theyseized control of Twelfth Street:

"For the first time in our lives wefelt free. Most important, we wereright in what we did to the law.

"I felt powerful and good insidefor being a part of those who final-ly fought back regardless of fear. . ..Within the aggregation of peoplethis night there was a certain unique

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madness that had taken possessionof everyone's body and soul whichwas almost what could be called theunification of the rebellious spirit ofman; a fearless spirit ordained forcomplete liberation of the self, com-bined with and supported by a com-munity at large. Guess one couldsay it was like fighting and gainingyour citizenship, after having givenit away to obedience to the law -police law - which was a one-manjudge and assassin that ruled blackpeople." (Hurt, Baby, Hurt)

The police sergeant who led theraid on the "blind pig" recalls:

"The real trouble didn't start un-til we started to leave with the lastwagonload, and we couldn't get ourcars out. By the time we pulledaway, more bottles and bricks werecoming. A lot of the windows werebroken out in one of the cars. Weanswered radio runs for looting,fire, shooting, curfew violationsand anything else that happened.

"The sniping was real. I was inthe station more than once wherewe were being sniped at the desk inthe station. Some of the motormentell me that in the armored person-nel carriers, you'd hear a bang ora ping on the outside, and youcouldn't tell for sure if somebodyhad thrown a rock or if somebodyshot at you.

"Yes, I was scared. You'redamned right I was scared. Morethan once I was scared." (Excerptsfrom a forthcoming oral history bySidneyFine) **,r

To keep Detroit's Blacks "inline" was the task of the city policeforce, which was 93 percent white.Neighborhoods were prowled by theBig Four, the police cruisers whosefour officers would "beat the hellout of you for recreation." In lateJune 1967, Danny Thomas, a Black27-year-old army vet who lived onlyfour blocks from Twelfth and Clair-mount, was killed by a gang ofwhite youths when he tried to pro-tect his pregnant wife from theirsexual advances. She later lost thebaby. The police refused to arrestthe gang. The incident was kept outof the major newspapers until thecity's Black newspaper made it abanner headline.

Thus, although placed at the

heart of American society as urbanworkers, Blacks were still forciblyheld in an exploited and oppressedcondition relative to whites.

A sense of the anger simmeringin places like Twelfth Street is typi-fied by Bill Scott, when he recallshow he felt after weeks of search-ing for a job in that summer of1967:

"[One] day I realized with com-plete understanding that somethingwas wrong because there shouldhave been a job for me somewherein that entire city.... But then therewere no jobs for a lot of people onthe streets. Wait a minute now, af-ter all I was doing the Americanthing by trying to pull myself up bymy bootstraps; I was educating my-self; there should have been somekind of work.... I had just finishedsubmitting a job application at oneof the many downtown employmentoffices and was on my way back tomy sister's home, when somethingcame to me like the ring of a bellwhich caused me to ask myself onequestion, 'Tell me something, Bill,why is it that you don't see any ofthese white cats walking aroundlooking for a job, not to mentionthat they are on their lunch breaks,well-dressed, and carefree as any-body would want to be?' This wasthe day I decided to reject anythingthat was white. I could no longer tellmyself that it was going to work outand I had also to get to work on myracist feelings towards my ownworld: Black. There was nothing inthe white world that had beenmeant for me... nothing. I wasn'teven supposed to be out there in thefirst place. And going to collegewasn't going to change the waywhite people mistreated and mur-dered Black people in any way pos-sible." (Hurt, Baby, Hurt)

luly 23, 1967

"That Sunday, my wife went tochurch on Twelfth Street, not toofar from where the incident had oc-curred. And she came back, shesaid, you know, there's a sort ofstillness that's there that I don't un-derstand. She said, it's too calm.And I said, well, you know, therers something rather strange. And welooked outside and there was an in-ordinate amount of fires that were

trickling up through the air!"This recollection on the tense

calm that settled into the initial six-block riot area during the first day-light hours after the police retreatcomes from a Black teacher. About25-years-old at the time, he workedevenings as a driver and was able toobserve much of the rebellion as itbroke into full fury for the next fewdays. But on Sunday, city officials,caught off-guard and their forcesvastly outnumbered in the initialoutbreak, were hoping the distur-bance would ebb by itself througha policy of police restraint and me-dia blackout. He continues:

"The mayor, Jerome P.Cavanagh, said don't shoot thelooters. I think part of the reasonwhy that was the case, they said itwas that the Black community hadbeen responsible for his being elect-ed. Well that started, I would sayfor the next two days or so, a sortof interracial stealing binge, inwhich you had Black folks andwhite folks hand-in-hand going intovarious stores, pillaging them, giv-ing a certain amount of time for thepeople to get their goods, and thenthey would flee the area."

In a picnic-like atmosphere oftinkling glass, shouts of laughter,and Motown music blaring fromtransistor radios, for two days theway wealth flows in the city wasreversed on a grand scale. Im-poverished folk liberated basicfoodstuffs from grocery storeswhere they'd been cheated foryears, and less-needy residentscould be seen rolling sofas out of ex-clusive stores like Charles Furnitureon Olympia Street. At posh cloth-ing outlets along Livernois, the''Avenue of Fashion, " cooperativelooters were heard exchanging theirwaist sizes with each other. Somelooted with shopping lists in hand.The owner of a music shop report-ed losing every electric guitar, am-plifier, and jazz album in the place

- but the classical records were leftuntouched.

The burning and looting wereseen as one way to strike back at therelations of distribution, the hidden"ghetto taxes" and how all of lifewas stacked against them, and intheir forays they liked to target themost hated businesses. One auto

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worker who stayed away from hisjob at a Ford plant on Monday tolda reporter:

"People are bitter. White peoplegyp you all the time. I went to a gasstation at Wyandotte and Michiganto get a tire changed. It was rainingand the man wouldn't change it.Then he wanted to charge me $12to change it because I'm a Negro.That kind of stuff is wrong. I'vebeen looking for this riot to happenfor years."As he escorted the reporter on atour of the looted area, he stoppedin front of a now-empty furniturestore to say,

"You go in there to buy furnitureand those people would act like theywere doing you a favour. They sendfurniture down here that the whitepeople wouldn't have and then theycharge you double for it. It's toomuch."

Late that evening, a 45-year-oldwhite man, working in a grocery-looting team of whites and Blacks,was shot to death by a market own-er. It was the first fatality in the riot.

Five different banks werestormed, all to no avail. But amongthe more prized items taken were atotal of 2,498 rifles and thirty-eighthandguns. Many of these would beput to use in the days to follow.

Fully one-quarter of the looterswere under 17. And the role of ghet-to youth in this and other stages ofthe rebellion stood out clearly.Youngsters whose only image of thecops had been that of the hated BigFour could hardly believe their ownsudden strength. This was not loston city officials, who grimly con-cluded afterwards that 60 percent ofthose participating had been be-tween 15 and24 years old. MayorCavanagh showed movies of the re-bellion to the members of the Kern-er Commission in Washington, thensaid:

"Look at the faces. You will seemostly young men. These youngmen are the fuse. For the most partthey have no experience in realproductive work. For the most part,they have no stake in the social ar-rangements of life. For the mostpart, they have no foreseeable fu-ture except among the hustlers andminor racketeers. For the most part,they are cynical, hostile, frustrated,

and angry against a system they feelhas included them out. At the sametime, they are filled with the brava-do of youth and a code of behaviorwhich is hostile to authority."(John Hesey, The Algiers MotelIncident)

With neither a 9-to-5 curfew northe presence of city police an equalmatch for these huge and youthfulmobs, Cavanagh was forced to callin 350 state troopers and 900 Michi-gan National Guardsmen on thevery first day of the rebellion. Theguardsmen were summoned fromtheir summer encampment in arural area of the state. Many hadnever visited a large city nor seen aBlack person except on television.One can imagine their thoughtswhen their conyoy reached GrandBlanc and they saw an ominousplume of smoke rising above the un-seen city forty-five miles further tothe southeast. It was at that pointthat they were issued their ammu-nition.

The Guard troops were stationedat various high-school staging areasin Detroit. Undisciplined, trigger-happy, without any riot trainingother than a few words about "mobcontrol," they were then dispatcheddown the darkened city streetswhere no mobs were to be found,only lots of hostile activity. ByMonday there were 800 state policeand over 9,000 guardsmen in thecity, the latter representing 85 per-cent of all Guard forces statewide.This would not be enough.

According to various accounts, itwas sometime on Monday that thewhole character of the rebelliontook a leap. Gunfire against theauthorities, which had started thepreceding evening, became thefavoured activity of the rioters,both Black and white. It began withFire Department personnel drawinghostile bullets. All told, on 285 oc-casions firemen had to retreat fromthe scene of a fire. When armedofficers intervened, it developedinto fierce gun battles fought direct-ly with police and National Guards-men. It was reported that during asingle hour on Monday, for exam-ple, a police dispatcher counted twoprecinct stations, two riot commandposts, and five fire stations all un-der sniper attack.

On Monday afternoon, PresidentJohnson dispatched a task force of4,7 50 par atroopers, comprising the82nd and l0lst Airborne divisions,from Ft. Bragg and Ft. Campbell toSelfridge Air Force Base north ofDetroit. He also sent a team of per-sonal envoys, headed by CyrusVance (former Deputy Secretary ofDefence under Kennedy and laterSecretary of State under Carter).But there was deep division withinruling circles over the deploymentof these troops, which had been re-quested twelve hours earlier byGovernor Romney and MayorCavanagh....

Finally, Johnson authorized thatthe federal troops be deployed, andsimultaneously that the Guard befederalized. With the guardsmen al-ready stationed on the west sidewhere the rebellion had erupted, thearmy soldiers were deployed on theeast side, where the rebellion hadonly recently spread. Thus, onTuesday some of the rebels movedaway from the crack federal troopsand shifted over to the west side ofthe city. Gunfighting continued foranother two or three days.

The Detroit News vividlydescribed the scene in the Wednes-day edition:

"Negro snipers turned 140 squareblocks north of West Grand Blvd.into a bloody battlefield for threehours last night, temporarily rout-ing police and national guards-men.... Tanks thundered throughthe streets and heavy machine gunsclattered.... The scene was incredi-ble. It was as though the Viet Conghad infiltrated the riot-blackenedstreets. "

Some observers perceived a cer-tain degree of organisation amongthe rioters. Even the small degree oforganisation that people among theBlack masses had built (Black vetsin particular) expressed itself power-fully in various ways. One observertestified that he'd overheard an ear-ly walkie-talkie command to spreadthe disorder to the east side. Theauthorities in their fear saw thingseverywhere - some real, some not.The Fire Chief felt that arsonistsused divide-and-conquer tactics,and that others lured his men intogun ambushes by telephoning bogusreports of fires. A survey of metro-

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area residents two weeks after therebellion found that 55.5 percentfelt that it had been planned, andmany were inclined to call it an in-surrection or rev*olution.

The sheer scale of this rebellionis impressive. Consider the portionof the city which police designatedthe "central civil disorder area."This area alone straddled both sidesof the city, extending over someforty of the city's 140 square miles[over 350 square kilometers]. Whenthe smoke finally cleared, some1,300 buildings had been burnedand 2,7 00 looted, property damageexceeded $50 million, and 5,000people were left homeless by wind-swept fires. There were 7,231 arrest-ed (6,407 of them Black), 386 in-jured, and 43 dead (33 of themBlack).

In addition, the rebellion ignitedsimultaneous uprisings - all ofthem serious enough to deploy Na-tional Guardsmen or state police -in five other cities: in Pontiac, Flint,and Saginaw to the north; in GrandRapids, some 150 miles to the west;and in Toledo, Ohio to the south.Disturbances of varying intensitywere also simultaneously occurringin more than two dozen other citiesin Michigan, Ohio and other states.

After surveying the rubble, Hen-ry Ford II, chairman of Ford Mo-tor Company, was asked tocomment. Ford emphasized thatwhat Detroit had seen was not arace riot. It was

"a complete breakdown of lawand order. But I don't think that ascitizens of this country, any of uscan allow these things to go on.These small minorities - these rab-blerousers, whether they be white orBlack - have to be taken to task.They seem to want to take the lawinto their own hands. I think thesepeople must be apprehended andtried for their respective crimes,whatever they may be, in courts oflaw. And I think they should thenbe judged on whatever they mayhave done.

"It is my feeling that this coun-try may turn out to be the laughingstock of the world because of situ-ations such as we've had in Detroit.I don't think there is much point intrying to sell the world on emulat-

ing our system and way of life if wecan't even put our own house inorder." (Automotive News)

The ruling class was deeply dis-turbed: this uprising in one of thechief industrial centres of the na-tion's heartland, quelled only by theintervention of the U.S. Army, hadbroadcast a message to the wholeworld that the American system wasbankrupt - and*vulnerable.

A single week of rebellion allowsthe oppressed to distinguish friendsfrom enemies better than wholeyears of normal times.

Early on the first day of the re-bellion, Hubert Locke, a Black ad-ministrative assistant to Detroit'spolice commissioner, calledtogether several of the city'sResponsible Negro Leaders. Inpairs, they fanned out through theTenth Precinct to plead with thecrowds to disperse. One pair com-prised Deputy School Superinten-dent Arthur Johnson and U.S.Representative John Conyers, Jr.,who was quite popular among hisconstituents.

At one intersection, Conyersstood upon the hood of the car andshouted through a bullhorn,"We're with you! But please! Thisis not the way to do things! Pleasego back to your homes!" "No, no,no," the mob chanted, "Don'twant to hear it!" "Uncle Tom!"One man in the crowd, a civil rightsactivist whom Conyers had oncedefended in a trial, was inciting thecrowd and shouting at Conyers,"Why are you defending the copsand the establishment? You're justas bad as they are!" Rocks and bot-tles flew toward the car, one ofthem hitting a cop nearby. Thecrowd was getting "uglier." John-son whispered into Conyers' ear,"John, let's get the hell out ofhere." As Conyers climbed downfrom the hood of the car, heremarked to a reporter in disgust,"You try to talk to those people andthey'll knock you into the middle ofnext year."

Recently, we asked D., a Blackrevolutionary who was very youngat the time, how much the rebellionof the "young kids" had impingedon the routine of the older Blackworkers, like his father. He

recalled:"At home, that's all they talked

about. Even with a lot of the olderBlacks, there was mixed feelings.You had a lot of them, they finallysensed that this is the beginning ofsomething: finally, the Black folksthat rose up. A lot of that hostilityand outrage toward the system iscoming out, it was being actualizedin Black youth. From just the youngbrother and sister throwing a rockthrough a window and grabbingsomething, or a old person justhollering - it affected everybody."

For two decades, the powerfulforces underlying these storms hadbeen coalescing. Prior to WorldWar 2 the livelihood of Blacks in theU.S. had been largely characterizedby sharecropping and subsistencefarming in the south, together withthe enforced illiteracy, Jim Crowsegregation, and lynch-mob terrorthat bolstered this semifeudal exis-tence. But on the basis of itsdominant world position securedthrough the war, the U.S. set aboutmechanizing southern agriculture,profoundly transforming the econ-omy and whole mode of life in theregion. Millions of Blacks andothers, their farm labour superflu-ous, were forced to leave the landand migrate to the cities. Between1940 and 1966 some 3.7 millionBlacks left the South. Indeed, by1966 a higher proportion of Blacks(69 percent) than of whites (64 per-cent) lived in metropolitan areas.

Detroit was typical. The propor-tion of its population that was Blackgrew from 9 percent in 1940 to 16percent in 1950 to 34 percent in1965.

But this was more than just theshift of people on a map. It was ashift in the whole economic statusof the masses of Black people, frompeasants to proletarians. In Detroit,Black people sometimes quippedthat Hitler and Tojo did more forthe emancipation of their labourthan did Lincoln and Roosevelt.This was because many Blacks filledpositions in industry that werecreated by the war itself and by thegenerally prosperous Americaneconomy that ensued. In the early1960s Detroit's auto industry ex-perienced a sales boom. Employ-ment at the Big 3 auto companies

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grew from 723,556 in 1960 to1,020,783 in 1968. The proportionof Blacks employed in these compa-nies, which in 1940 had been lessthan 2 percent, climbed from 9.1percent in 1960 to 13.6 percent in1966.

At the same time, Black auto-workers were concentrated in theworst and most hazardous of theplant jobs, jobs that were strenu-ous, grimy, noisy and noxious andrequired little skill. Although 13.6percent of the overall workforcewas Black, among labourers andoperatives it was 26.6 percent andamong craftsmen it was only 3.0percent. In one typical factory, theDodge Main assembly plant, whitescomprised 90 percent of all skilledtradesmen, 95 percent of all fore-men, 99 percent of all general fore-men, and 100 percent of allsuperintendents. On top of this, theUnited Auto Workers (UAW),which for decades had outright ex-cluded Blacks from its union rolls,continued to be blatantly racist.

In some ways, the situation insidethe auto plants was a microcosm ofthe general situation in the northerncities facing Black people who re-mained overwhelmingly at the bot-tom of a society where the whitemiddle class was enjoying new post-war privileges and the trickle-downtreats of U.S. w_o1l{ domination....

One of the most distinctiveaspects of the Detroit rebellion,even when placed beside other ur-ban rebellions of the decade, wasthe mass participation by membersof the working class, including basicindustrial workers. In this regard,the rebellion was a sort of "weathervane" that pointed to the revolu-tionary potential of the urbanproletariat, and it was the referencepoint for a revolutionary movementthat grew in the auto plants duringthe next few years.

Participation in the rebellion washighest among the most deprivedstrata of the Black working class,but it also extended broadly toBlack and white strata above (aswell as below) that point of concen-tration. In Detroit, Black and otherpeople who could be classified"lower middle class" rioted side-by-side with those on the bottom of so-

ciety. A survey of 1,200 men beingheld at Jackson prison after their ar-rest in the rebellion found that 40percent were employed by the Big3 auto companies, and an additional40 percent by other large, mostlyunionized employers. Also, 80 per-cent received wages of at least$6,000 (in 1967 dollars), which wasonly slightly below the citywide fa-mily income average of $6,400 forBlacks and $6,800 for whites.(Poverty level was $3,335 for an ur-ban family of four.)

In the auto plants themselves, ab-senteeism was so high during the re-bellion that many assemblyoperations ground to a halt for twodays. The afternoon and eveningshifts were cancelled off the bat dueto the curfew, even though the cur-few was not enforced against per-sons commuting to and from work.But even on the day shift, with nocurfew in effect, many plants inboth Detroit and Pontiac ex-perienced absenteeism levels as highas 80 to 85 percent. Fortunately forMr. Ford and his ilk, assemblyoperations were already down bymore than half for model-yearchangeover; nevertheless, absentee-ism due to the rebellion causedproduction losses exceeding 3,000vehicles worth many millions ofdollars.

While large numbers of autowor-kers were in the thick of the rebel-lion, within the auto plantsthemselves the atmosphere,although tense, did not erupt intoviolence or walkouts as the compa-nies feared. The Automotive Newscommented, "the automotive in-dustry almost miraculously escapedthe fury."

But the rebellion upped the antein the already racially polarized fac-tories. One worker, who commut-ed from the Black suburb of Inksterto work in Detroit, recently recalledfor us the atmosphere inside one ofthe Big 3. During the week of therebellion, some white foremenlocked themselves in the foremen'soffice at shift-end until all the Blackworkers had left, afraid that theymight get hurt. In the immediatewake of the rebellion, workers whohad been involved were circumspectabout their activity, "they didn'ttalk much about it. Some stole more

than the kids." Nevertheless, due tothe liberated climate overall, the po-litical balance had shifted on thefactory floors. For example, previ-ously "you had Black Uncle Tomswho didn't want to sit with Blacks.But when the riots happened, theyleft the whites and came to sit withthe Blacks. I told them, 'Go backwhere you came from.'"

Alongside the participation ofworkers, the role of Vietnam vete-rans stood out in the rebellion andwas reflected in the gun battles. Theoccupying soldiers of the U.S.Army and Michigan NationalGuard weren't the only ones whocould put their combat experiencein the rice paddies and rain forestsof Southeast Asia to use in the al-leys and boulevards of a moderncity. Once again, America's reac-tionary marauding overseas hadcome back to haunt it....

There are some lessons learnedyoung which stubbornly linger. Onewho was ten-years-old in 1967 hadthis to say in 1987:

"What it showed, actually, is thatrevolution is possible in the UnitedStates. Looking back, that it's pos-sible. The fact that the riots had asignificant impact on everybody,not only Blacks but Chicanos, Puer-to Ricans, Native Americans, andeven the progressive whites, it hadradicalized everybody. Not onlythat, it had an impact on people allover the world, that something likethis could take place right here inthe United States. Before 1967,Blacks thought it was impossible toreally rise up against the system thatway. And it showed, too, the poten-tialities of the masses of Blacks, ifthe energies and hostilities aredirected at the oppressor. That'show I look back on '67. It's beenso much written about it, it's somuch to actually learn about it andconsciously relearn about the '60s.But really it symbolized revolutionis ripe and can happen right here inthe citadel of imperialism." tr

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