TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60urban.004

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                                                                                August 4, 1967

CITIES

The Fire This Time


     At midnight, Hubert G. Locke, a Negro who is administrative
assistant to the police commissioner, left his desk at
headquarters and climbed to the roof for a look at Detroit. When
he saw it, he wept. Beneath him whole sections of the nation's
fifth largest city lay in charred, smoking ruins. From Grand
River Avenue, to Gratiot Avenue six miles to the east, tongues
of flame licked at the night sky, illuminating the angular
skeletons of gutted homes, shops, supermarkets. Looters and
arsonists danced in the eerie shadows, stripping a store clean,
then setting it to the torch. Mourned Mayor Jerome Cavanagh: "It
looks like Berlin in 1945."

     In the violent summer of 1967, Detroit became the scene of
the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in
terms of property damage in U.S. history. At week's end, there
were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000
people were homeless (the vast majority Negro), while 1,300
buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks and
2,700 businesses sacked. Damage estimates reached $500 million.
The grim accounting surpassed that of the Watts riot in Los
Angeles where 34 died two years ago and property losses ran to
$40 million. More noteworthy, the riot surpassed those that had
preceded it in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 in a more
fundamental way. For here was the most sensational expression of
an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a
small but significant segment of America's Negro minority.

     Blind Pig. Typically enough, Detroit's upheaval started
with a routine police action. Seven week ago, in the Virginia
Park section of the West Side, a "blind pig" (afterhours club)
opened for business on Twelfth Street, styling itself the
"United Community League for Civic Action." Along with the
afterhours booze that it offered to minors, the "league" served
up black-power harangues and curses against Whitey's
exploitation. It was at the blind pig, on a sleazy strip of
pawnshops and bars, rats and pimps, junkies and gamblers, that
the agony began.

     Through an informant, police were kept advised of the
League's activities. At 1:45 a.m. Sunday, the informant, a wino
and ex-convict, passed the word (and was paid 50 cents for it):
"It's getting ready to blow." Two hours later, 10th Precinct
Sergeant Arthur Howison led a raid on the League, arresting 73
Negro customers and the bartender. In the next hour, while squad
cars and a paddy wagon ferried the arrested to the police
station, a crowd gathered, taunting the fuzz and "jiving" with
friends who had been picked up. "Just as we were pulling away,"
Howison said, "a bottle smashed a squad-car window." Then it
began.

     Rocks and bottles flew. Looting, at first dared by only a
few, became a mob delirium as big crowds now gathered, ranging
through the West Side, then spilling across Woodward Avenue into
the East Side. Arsonists lobbed Molotov cocktails at newly
pillaged stores. Fires started in the shops, spread swiftly to
homes and apartments. Snipers took up posts in windows and on
rooftops. For four days and into the fifth, mobs stole, burned
and killed as a force of some 15,000 city and state police,
National Guardsmen and federal troops fought to smother the
fire. The city was almost completely paralyzed.

     It Can't Happen Here. For the last couple of years, city
officials had been saying proudly: "That sort of thing can't
happen here." It had seemed a reasonable enough prediction.

     Fully 40% of the city's Negro family heads own their own
homes. No city has waged a more massive and comprehensive war on
poverty. Under Mayor Jerry Cavanagh, an imaginative liberal with
a knack for landing Government grants, the city has grabbed off
$42 million in federal funds for its poverty programs, budgeted
$30 million for them this year alone. Because many of the city's
520,000 Negroes (out of a population of 1,600,000) are
unequipped to qualify for other than manual labor, some $10
million will go toward special training and placement programs
for the unskilled and the illiterate. A $4,000,000 medical
program furnished family-planning advice, outpatient clinics
and the like. To cool any potential riot fever, the city had
allotted an additional $3,000,000 for this summer's Head Start
and recreation programs. So well did the city seem to be
handling its problems that Congress of Racial Equity Director
Floyd McKissick excluded Detroit last winter when he drew up a
list of twelve cities where racial trouble was likely to flare.

     Anywhere. McKissick's list has proved to be woefully
incomplete. So far this summer, some 70 cities -- 40 in the
past week alone -- have been hit. In the summer of 1967, "it"
can happen anywhere, and sometimes seems to be happening
everywhere. Detroit's outbreak was followed by a spate of
eruptions in neighboring Michigan cities -- Grand Rapids,
Kalamazoo, Flint, Muskegon, West Michigan and Pontiac, where a
state assemblyman, protecting the local grocery that he had
owned for years, shot a 17-year-old Negro looter to death. White
and Negro vandals burned and looted in Louisville.
Philadelphia's Mayor James Tate declared a state of limited
emergency as rock-throwing Negro teenagers pelted police prowl
cars. A dozen youths looted a downtown Miami pawnshop and ran
off with 20 rifles, leaving other merchandise untouched. Some
200 Negroes in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., smashed downtown store
windows. In Arizona, 1,500 National Guard members were alerted
when sniper fire and rock throwing broke out in Phoenix.

     In New York's East Harlem, Puerto Ricans broke windows,
looted and sniped from rooftops for three nights after a
policeman fatally shot a man who had pulled a knife on him. At
one point, the youths who led the rioting drew a chalk line
across Third Avenue and tauntingly wrote: "Puerto Rican
territory. Don't cross, flatfoot."

     Ironically, New York -- like Detroit -- has launched a
major summer entertainment program designed to cool the ghettos
by keeping the kids off the streets. "We have done everything in
this city to make sure we have a stable summer," said Mayor John
Lindsay. But after one of those "stabilizing" events, a Central
Park rock-`n'-roll concert featuring Smokey Robinson and the
Miracles, a boisterous band of some 150 Negroes wandered down
toward midtown Manhattan, heaved trash baskets through the
windows of three Fifth Avenue clothing stores and helped
themselves. The looters' favorite was a $56 Austrian alpaca
sweater, which is a status symbol in Harlem. Among the 23 whom
police were able to catch: four Harlem summer antipoverty
workers who earn up to $90 a week from the city.

     Black & White. All of these were tame enough alongside
Detroit. The violence there last week was not a race riot in
the pattern of the day-log 1943 battle between Negroes and
whites that left 34 known dead. Last week poor whites in one
section along Grand River Avenue joined teams of young Negroes
in some integrated looting. When the rioters began stoning and
sniping at firemen trying to fight the flames, many Negro
residents armed themselves with rifles and deployed to protect
the firemen. "They say they need protection," said one such
Negro, "and we're damned well going to give it to them." Negro
looters screamed at a well-dressed Negro psychiatrist: "We're
going to get you rich nigger next."

     Detroit has no single massive ghetto. Its Negroes, lower,
middle and upper income, are scattered all over the city, close
to or mixed in with white residents. But unemployment is high
among Negroes (6% to 8% v. the over-all national level of 4%)
and housing is often abominable. It is particularly ramshackle,
crowded and expensive around the scabrous environs of Twelfth
Street, once part of a prosperous Jewish section.

     "They Won't Shoot." When the trouble began outside Twelfth
Street's blind pig, the 10th precinct at that early hour could
muster only 45 men. Detroit police regard the dawn hours of
Sunday, when the action is heaviest in many slums, as a "light
period." The precinct captain rushed containing squads to seal
off the neighborhood for 16 square blocks. Police Commissioner
Ray Girardin decided, because of his previous success with the
method, to instruct his men to avoid using their guns against
the looters. That may have been a mistake.

     As police gave ground, the number of looters grew. "They
won't shoot," an eleven-year-old Negro boy said coolly, as a
pack of looters fled at the approach of a busload of police.
"The mayor said they aren't supposed to."

     At 6:30 a.m., the first fire was in a shoe store. When fire
engines screamed to the scene, rocks flew. One fireman, caught
squarely in the jaw, was knocked from a truck to the gutter.
More and more rioters were drawn to the streets by the sound of
the sirens and a sense of summer excitement.

     "The noise of destruction adds to its satisfaction," Elias
Canetti notes in Crowds and Power. "The banging of windows and
smashing of glass are the robust sounds of fresh life, the cries
of something newborn." In Detroit, they proved to be -- with the
rattling of gunfire -- the sounds of death. Throughout the
Detroit riot there was -- as in Newark -- a spectacularly
perverse mood of gaiety and light-hearted abandon in the mob -- a
"carnival spirit," as a shocked Mayor Cavanagh called it,
echoing the words used by New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes
after he toured stricken Newark three weeks ago.

     "Sold Brother." Looters skipped gingerly over broken glass
to take in wrist watches and clothing from shop windows. One
group of hoods energetically dismantled a whole front porch and
lobbed bricks at police. Two small boys struggled down Twelfth
Street with a load of milk cartons and a watermelon. Another
staggered under the weight of a side of beef. One prosperous
Negro used his Cadillac convertible to haul off a brand-new
deep freeze.

     Some of the looters were taking a methodical revenge upon
the area's white merchants, whose comparatively high prices,
often escalated to offset losses by theft and the cost of
extra-high insurance premiums, irk the residents of slum
neighborhoods. Most of the stores pillaged and destroyed were
groceries, supermarkets and furniture stores; of Detroit's 630
liquor stores, 250 were looted. Many drunks careened down
Twelfth Street consuming their swag. Negro merchants scrawled
"Soul Brother" -- and in one case, "Sold Brother" -- on their
windows to warn the mobs off. But many of their stores were
ravaged nonetheless.

     Into Next Year. The mobs cared nothing for "Negro
leadership" either. When the riot was only a few hours old,
John Conyers, one of Detroit's two Negro Congressmen, drove up
Twelfth Street with Hubert Locke and Deputy School
Superintendent Arthur Johnson. "Stay cool, we're with you!"
Conyers shouted to the crowd. "Uncle Tom!" they shouted back.
Someone heaved a bottle and the leaders beat a prompt retreat,
not wanting to become "handkerchief heads" in the bandaged
sense of the epithet. "You try to talk to these people," said
Conyers unhappily, "and they'll knock you into the middle of
next year."

     Riots and looting spread through the afternoon over a 10.8-
sq.-mi. area of the West Side almost as far north as the
Northland Shopping Center. An entire mile of Twelfth Street was a
corridor of flame; firemen answering the alarms were pelted with
bricks, and at one point they abandoned their hoses in the
streets and fled, only to be ordered back to the fire by
Cavanagh.

     Some 5,000 thieves and arsonists were ravaging the West
Side. Williams Drug Store was a charred shell by dusk. More than
one grocery collapsed as though made of Lincoln Logs. A paint
shop erupted and took the next-door apartment with it. In many
skeletal structures the sole sign of life was a wailing burglar
alarm. Lou's Men's Wear expired in a ball of flame. Meantime,
a mob of 3,000 took up the torch on the East Side several miles
away. The Weather Bureau's tornado watch offered brief hope of
rain to damp the fires, but it never came.

     Spreading Fires. Rushing to Detroit at midday Sunday,
Michigan's Governor George Romney called in 370 state troopers
to beef up the defenses, then by late afternoon ordered 7,000
National Guardsmen mobilized.

     Through the night the contagion spread. The small cities of
Highland Park and Hamtramck, whose boundaries are encircled by
Detroit, were under siege by looters. A four-mile section of
Woodward Avenue was plundered. Twenty blocks of Grand River
Avenue were in flames. Helicopters with floodlights chattered
over the rooftops while police on board with machine guns
squinted for the muzzle fire of snipers, who began shooting
sporadically during the night.

     Before dawn, Romney, Cavanagh and Negro Congressman Charles
Diggs began their day-long quest for the intervention of federal
troops. Detroit's jail were jammed far past capacity, and police
converted part of their cavernous garage at headquarters into
noisome, overflowing detention center.

     Recorder's Court began marathon sessions to arraign
hundreds of prisoners herded in from the riot areas. In twelve
hours, Judge Robert J. Colombo heard more than 600 not-guilty
pleas. To keep the arrested off the streets until the city
stopped smoking, bonds were set at $25,000 for suspected
looters, $200,000 for suspected snipers. Said the harassed
judge to one defendant: "You're nothing but a lousy, thieving
looter. It's too bad they didn't shoot you."

     Empty Streets. As Detroit's convulsion continued into the
week, homes and shops covering a total area of 14 square miles
were gutted by fire. While U.S. Army paratroopers skillfully
quieted their assigned trouble area on the East Side, National
Guardsmen, jittery and untrained in riot control, exacerbated
the trouble where it all started, on Twelfth Street. Suspecting
the presence of snipers in the Algiers Motel, Guardsmen laid
down a brutal barrage of automatic-weapons fire. When they
burst into a motel room, they found three dead Negro teenage
boys -- and no weapon. The Guardsmen did have cause to be
nervous about snipers. Helen Hall, a Connecticut woman staying
at the Harlan House Motel just two blocks from Detroit's famed
Fisher Building, on the fringe of the riots, walked to a hallway
window Tuesday night to see what the shooting was about. She
died with a sniper's bullet in her heart.

     By Tuesday morning, Detroit was shrouded in acrid smoke.
The Edsel Ford and John C. Lodge freeways were nearly deserted.
Tens of thousands of office and factory workers stayed home.
Downtown streets that are normally jammed were almost empty.
Looters smashed the windows of a Saks Fifth Avenue branch near
the General Motors office building, made off with furs and
dresses. With many grocery stores wrecked and plundered
throughout the city, food became scarce. Some profiteering
merchants were charging as much as $1 for bread.

     Well of Nihilism. George Romney had a terse evaluation of
the chaos: "There were some civil rights overtones, but
primarily this is a case of lawlessness and hoodlumism.
Disobedience to the law cannot and will not be tolerated."

     Some Negroes, to be sure, were among the most insistent in
demanding that the police start shooting looters. But the
eruption, if not a "civil rights" riot, was certainly a Negro
riot. It was fed by a deep well of nihilism that many Negroes
have begun to tap. They have despaired finally -- some this
summer, others much earlier -- of hope in white America. Last
week at Newark's black-power conference, which met as that city
was patching up its own wounds, Conference Chairman Nathan
Wright put is succinctly: "The Negro has lived with the slave
mentality too long. It was always `Jesus will lead me and the
white man will feed me.' Black power is the only basis for
unity now among Negroes."

     The new aggressiveness of black power is particularly
attractive to the young. The 900 conference delegates in Newark,
most of them in their 20s, whooped their approval of resolutions
that called for, among other things: an investigation of the
possible separation of the U.S. into distinct black and white
countries (which curiously suggests the South African division
of apartheid); a boycott of all sports by Negro athletes; and
a protest against birth-control clinics on the grounds that they
represent a white conspiracy to eradicate the black race.

     "No Conspiracy." Disturbed by this angry mood, some
Congressmen suggested that Negro militants with king-size chips
on their shoulders might be directly responsible for the rash of
riots. Detroit Police Commissioner Girardin, however, said he
could find "no evidence of conspiracy involved in the riots."
The Justice Department minimized the theory that U.S. racial
uprisings are fomented and organized by Communists, black
nationalists or other "outside agitators." Still, there is no
doubt that once a riot is touched off, Black Panthers, RAMs
(for Revolutionary Action Movement), and other firebrands are
active in fanning the flames.

     Arriving in Havana last week to be lionized by Fidel
Castro, Stokely Carmichael, coiner of the black-power slogan,
left no doubt that this was true. Declared Carmichael: "In
Newark, we applied the war tactics of the guerrillas. We are
preparing groups of urban guerrillas for our defense in the
cities. The price of these rebellions is a high price that one
must pay. This fight is not going to be a simple street
meeting. It is going to be a fight to the death."

     "Bad Man." Cambridge, Md., got a sample of those war
tactics last week when H. "Rap" Brown (ne Hubert Geroid Brown),
23, Carmichael's successor as head of the inappropriately named
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, turned up at a Negro
rally. When Carmichael introduced Brown to reporters in Atlanta
last May as the new S.N.C.C. chairman, he chuckled: "You'll be
happy to have me back when you hear from him. He's a bad man."

     He certainly sounded bad enough. Mounting a car hood in
Cambridge, the scene of prolonged racial demonstrations three
years ago, Brown delivered an incendiary 50-minute harangue to a
crowd of some 300 Negroes. Recalling the death of a white
policeman during Plainfield, N.J., riots last month, Brown
bellowed: "Look what the brothers did in Plainfield. They
stomped a cop to death. Good. He's dead. They stomped him to
death. They threw a shopping basket on his head and took his
pistol and shot him and then cut him."

     Rap, who earned his nickname because, so the story goes,
his oratory inspired listeners to shout "Rap it to 'em, baby!"
was just getting warmed up. "Detroit exploded, Newark exploded,
Harlem exploded!" he cried. "It is time for Cambridge to
explode, baby." Continued Brown: "Black folks built America. If
America don't come around, we're going to burn America down,
brother. We're going to burn it if we don't get our share of
it."

     An hour later, shooting broke out. Brown received a
superficial wound in the forehead when Cambridge police opened
fire on a Negro crowd near Race Street. Brown disappeared, and
in the early morning, two blocks of Pine Street in the Negro
neighborhood caught fire, apparently by arson. The white
volunteer fire company failed to respond to the fire until it
had practically burned out, leveling a school, a church, a
motel and a tavern. When sobbing Negro women begged Police
Chief Brice Kinnamon to send the firemen in, he snapped: "You
people ought to have done something before this. You stood by
and let a bunch of goddam hoodlums come in here."

     In the ruins of his motel, Hansell Greene, 58, stood
sobbing. "I'm broke, I'm beat, and my own people did it," he
said. "It's all gone because of a bunch of hoodlums. I spent a
lifetime building this up, and now it's all gone." Across the
street, his brother's grocery also lay in smoking ruins.

     Like Cherry Pie. The next day Brown was arrested in
Alexandria, Va., on a fugitive warrant, charged by Maryland
with inciting to riot and arson. That rap could get Rap up to
20 years in jail. Released on $10,000 bond, Brown compulsively
continued to shoot off his mouth. Damning Lyndon Johnson for
sending "honky" cracker federal troops into Negro communities to
kill black people." [Honky, or honkie, is a black-power word for
any white man, derived from the derogatory "Hunkie" --
Hungarian.] Brown called the President "a wild mad dog, an
outlaw from Texas." He told Washington audiences: "Violence is
necessary. It is as American as cherry pie. If you give me a
gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might just shoot Lady
Bird." Echoing Brown, Harlem's defrocked Congressman Adam
Clayton Powell, still in Bimini after seven months, did little
to help cool off things by announcing in the midst of Detroit's
troubles that such riots were "a necessary phase of the black
revolution -- necessary!"

     They may also prove cruelly damaging to the hopes of many
Negroes. Says Urbanologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "At a time
when there is more evidence than ever about the need for
integration, rioters are undermining the grounds for integration
and letting all the whites say, `Those monkeys, those savages,
all Negroes are rioters. To hell with them.' This does nothing
for the guy who works at the post office and is slowly getting
ready to move out. He gets destroyed while the pimps and whores
go on." Georgia's Governor Lester Maddox promptly made Moynihan
sound prophetic. Said Maddox of the Newark and Detroit riots:
"You can't say `please' to a bunch of savages, rapists and
murderers."

     Back to Normal. In Detroit, despite continuing sniper
fire, the rampage began subsiding about the time that the
depleted stores ran out of items to loot. On the fifth day,
Commissioner Girardin's patrol car was picking its way through
downtown traffic, which finally began returning to its normal
state -- impossible. Suddenly the police dispatcher's voice
crackled over the radio and Girardin instinctively tensed.
"Watch out for stolen car," the dispatcher advised. Girardin's
well-wrinkled face was wreathed in a smile. "We are just about
back to normal," he said. "All we need now is a report of a
domestic quarrel."

     But Detroit will be some time recovering. Downtown, in the
City-County Building, more than 500 members of Detroit's white
and black establishment, including Henry Ford II and United Auto
Workers President Walter Reuther, responded to an invitation by
Romney and Cavanagh to a latter-day reconstruction meeting. True
to its motto, Resurget Cineribus, Detroit was determined to rise
from the ashes as swiftly as possible. As Reuther emphasized,
there would have to be some social rebuilding along with the
physical. Said he: "Most Americans are increasingly affluent,
but we have left some Americans behind. Those Americans do not
feel a part of society, and therefore don't behave like
responsible people. Only when they get their fair share of
America will they respond in terms of responsibility."

     Reuther said that up to 600,000 members of the U.A.W. would
be available in their spare time to help repair the ravages.
General Motors offered its "skills, facilities and resources"
to help rebuild the city. To be sure, some would just as soon
see it remain in ruins. "We'll burn this place down again," said
one rioter. "We'll burn down this whole stinking town." With
money and muscle, Detroit is now staking its future on the
proposition that most of its people -- black as well as white
-- would much rather build than burn.