40 Years After the Detroit Riots: Could It Happen Again?
By Jim Hubbard | July 23, 2007
July 23 of this year marks the 40th anniversary of arguably the worst riot in U.S. history. Early in the morning on Sunday, July 23, 1967 I saw billowing black smoke in the sky over much of the Detroit landscape from my apartment window.
I grabbed my cameras and drove toward the neighborhood where most of the smoke and fire seemed to be coming from. As I turned my car onto 12th Street the chaos instantly looked like a scene from a war film. Buildings were burning, people were running from one store to another to loot the goods and there were no police present. The riot had started a few hours earlier when the police raided an after-hours bar known as a blind pig and made several arrests. The rioting lasted for several days. President Johnson finally called in the U.S. Army's elite 82nd Airborne who had recently returned from Vietnam to quell the violence when it became apparent that the police and Michigan National Guard could not restore control.
The Detroit riot broke out less than two weeks after the Newark, NJ riot. I photographed the violence and destruction in Detroit for three straight days and sold my images to a wire service, United Press International (UPI), who distributed them world wide to newspapers and magazines. My pictures of the destruction were seen on many front pages around the world. Two of the more subtle images that were not transmitted by UPI are, in my view 40 years later, the most profound from my riot coverage and the two I am highlighting on Sharing Witness because of their symbolism. They were both taken a day or so after most of the fires were doused and the sniper fire quieted.
Detroit has never fully recovered from the effects of the 1967 riot. As the fifth largest city in the U.S. in the 1950s with nearly two million residents, the population has shrunk to well under one million. Rev. Horace L. Sheffield III, pastor of New Galilee Baptist Church in Detroit reports that he has talked to a significant number of people who say the lid is close to being blown off. He went on to say that this is the worst economy he has ever seen.
Today people's rage in many American cities is turned inward and sizzling. The police are often viewed, as they were in Detroit in 1967, as an insensitive occupying force in many urban neighborhoods. Economic disparity is as profound as ever in cities like Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. In Los Angeles since the 1992 Rodney King riot there have been many incidents that could have escalated into full scale riots and the police were placed on what they call "tactical alerts" in preparation for the worst case scenario. In California there is always the fear of the "big one" earthquake, as we are reminded when we feel the recurrent tremors that happen often. Urban unrest is similar in that there have been many tremors but years have passed since the full scale riots. Could it happen again? The conditions are right and it probably will.
THE PHOTOS
The top photo symbolizes racial harmony in the heart of the riot zone a few days after the riot began in Detroit as friends and coworkers gather on a street corner. In the bottom photo inner city youth meet "the man" and in this case the kids are enamored by the weapons members of the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne, recently returned from Vietnam, as the soldiers guard the streets of Detroit a few days after the riot erupted in 1967.