Why Did America Explode in Riots in 1967?

National Guardsmen patrol a Detroit street devastated by rioting, July 1967.

(Bettmann/Corbis)

Around daybreak on Sunday, July 23, 1967—40 years ago today—Detroit police officers raided an illegal after-hours bar, located in the city’s West Side black ghetto, where revelers were celebrating the homecoming of two Vietnam War veterans. The officers began cuffing 80 black men and women and shoving them into police vans. As the roundup neared completion, a bystander smashed a bottle against a patrol car. That set off one of the most destructive urban riots in American history.

Five days later, after two U.S. Army airborne divisions had quelled the violence, 43 people lay dead, more than 7,000 citizens were in police custody, and swaths of Detroit were smoldering ruins. Jimmy Breslin wrote, “The civil rights movement is becoming a rebellion.” A young instructor at Detroit’s Wayne State University described the tragedy as “the colonized reacting to colonization.”

In the months that followed, everyone had an explanation. The Detroit News reported that military and police officials claimed to have “strong evidence to suggest a national conspiracy.” The president of the Los Angeles police association said the riots had been “stirred by traveling agitators, perhaps hundreds of them.” The Republican Coordinating Committee in Congress adduced “hatemongers . . . traveling from community to community inciting insurrection.” On the other hand, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner and vice-chaired by New York City Mayor John Lindsay, found the riot’s causes “imbedded in a massive tangle of issues and circumstances . . . which arise out of the historical pattern of Negro-white relations in America . . . men and women without jobs, families without men, and schools where children are processed instead of educated, until they return to the street–to crime, to narcotics, to dependency on welfare, and to bitterness and resentment against society.” In short, “white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture.”

The 1967 Detroit riots were not one-of-a-kind. The year before, 38 American cities had broken out in violence, with seven deaths, 400 injuries, 3,000 arrests, and $5 million in property lost. Over the first nine months of 1967, 128 American cities suffered 164 riots, 33 of which brought in the state police, and 8 of which were serious enough to require calling up the National Guard. In the wake of his city’s insurrection, Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh of Detroit lamented, “It looks like Berlin in 1945.”

In fact, the roots of the Detroit riots, and of most of the urban riots of the late 1960s, were deep and varied. After World War II the industrial base in Northeastern and Midwestern cities had gone into a slow but steady decline as firms relocated to nearby suburbs or to other states where unions were weaker and wages lower. The loss of industrial jobs had been encouraged by federal policies that favored the Sunbelt over the Rust Belt in the awarding of defense and research contracts and by the general shift of population from North to South and from city to suburb. In the 1950s alone, the South’s share of defense spending doubled, and California’s portion of defense contracting jumped from 13.2 percent to 23.7 percent. Moreover, the South’s hostility to organized labor made it a haven for expanding businesses trying to rein in costs.

In the years between 1947 and 1963, Detroit lost 134,000 manufacturing jobs, even as some 200,000 black Southerners moved north to the city. The black newcomers, always the last to be hired and the first to be fired, faced widespread job and wage discrimination while the industrial job base that had helped previous waves of migrants shrank. All told, by the mid-1960s black unemployment rates were at 10 percent in New York, 17 percent in Chicago, 20 percent in Cleveland, and 39 percent in Detroit.

Compounding their difficulties, black city dwellers also faced serious housing discrimination. The great postwar housing boom was largely subsidized by the federal government, through agencies like the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured the vast portion of home mortgages, making them affordable for middle-income and working-class families, but African-Americans were excluded. The government’s own regulations explicitly prohibited the FHA from insuring mortgages for African-Americans or in areas where African-Americans lived. The reason for this was circular: Simply by being present in a neighborhood, the government maintained, black Americans lowered its property values, and the drop in property values made mortgages a poor risk. (Of course, by choking off mortgage subsidies in racially integrated areas, the government validated its own argument.)

By 1960, 60 percent of homes in America were owner-occupied, but black Americans were largely excluded. Many black city residents had no choice but to rent cramped apartments in dangerously overcrowded, subdivided buildings. And so, many black neighborhoods became wastelands, especially when landlords began boarding up or burning down some of their properties to avoid paying property taxes and made up for the lost income by subdividing other properties.

By the late 1960s, many buildings in black neighborhoods were empty and boarded up, attracting drug dealers, vagrants, prostitutes, and vandals. Other properties around them quickly deteriorated; they housed far too many tenants, and landlords typically neglected their upkeep. Yet because black Americans had to contend with an artificially tight rental market and an artificially depressed job market, the average family in places like New York’s Harlem neighborhood paid 45 percent of its monthly wages in rent, compared with 20 percent for the average white city resident.

Living in these conditions, their children attending segregated schools (the segregation was widely called “de facto,” though there was nothing accidental about housing segregation), lacking their share of municipal services from unresponsive local governments and hostile city police forces, black communities were ready to burst by 1967, and they did. Still, the Kerner Commission did not necessarily grasp the precise causes of the insurrection. The commission assumed that black rioters were from the ranks of the poor, young, and destitute. In fact, only 10 percent of those arrested in Detroit were juveniles, and among the adults, 83 percent were employed, and half of those with jobs were members of the United Auto Workers, with jobs in the troubled auto industry.

In effect, the riots were the product of despair. Black Americans who worked hard and played by the rules were being systematically denied the opportunity to share in the affluence and abundance of postwar America. “They tell us about that pie in the sky, but that pie in the sky is too damn high,” said one black rioter in Newark, New Jersey. In the aftermath of that insurrection, which took place only a few days before Detroit’s, the poet Amiri Baraka told a state commission that “the poorest black man in Newark, in America, knows how white people live. We have television sets; we see movies. We see the fantasy and the reality of white America every day.”

After the riots of the 1960s, America’s suburbs became more white and its cities more black. This happened as much in the North and on the West Coast—in Oakland, Los Angeles, Newark, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, Trenton, Camden, and Cleveland—as in the South, in Atlanta and Charlotte. As the funk artist George Clinton sang in the 1975 hit “Chocolate City,” “We didn’t get our forty acres and a mule, but we did get you, CC. . . . God bless CC and its vanilla suburbs.” Forty years after the Detroit riots, African-Americans have experienced tremendous upward mobility, and there are numerous thriving black suburban communities populated by educated middle-class residents, especially around Southern cities like Atlanta. But many of those who were left behind—in Newark, in Atlanta, in Detroit—continue to face the legacy of 1967. It is a story whose conclusion has yet to be written.

—Joshua Zeitz is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine and the author of Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women Who Made America Modern (Crown).