DETROIT

Detroit '67: 'We've got trouble' — Routine police raid ignites 5 days of rioting

Bill McGraw
Detroit Free Press special writer

Editor's note:This is the second installment in a three-part series exploring the 1967 riot. Here we look at the five days of violence that tore apart the city beginning 50 years ago today, on July 23, 1967. Last Sunday, we explored the tensions leading to the riot. Next Sunday, we'll examine the aftermath of the riot and its long-term effects on Detroit. You can read our complete coverage online at freep.com/detroit67.

Hundreds of people charge down 12th Street on Detroit's westside July 23, 1967, throwing stones and bottles at store fronts and looting them. The Detroit riot was touched off after police raided an after-hours club called a blind pig in a mostly black part of town.

The red emergency phone rang in Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin’s Lafayette Park bedroom at 5:20 a.m. on that Sunday 50 years ago today.

He awoke to a shock. It was Police Superintendent Eugene Reuter.

“I think we’ve got trouble on 12th Street,” Reuter said. He told Girardin that a police raid on a an after-hours drinking spot had turned violent. He was calling officers back to duty.

 

Girardin telephoned his boss, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, considered the most progressive mayor in big-city America, an Irish-Catholic New Deal Democrat who had made improving race relations a key part of his agenda.

Their nightmare scenario was unfolding on 12th Street: People were breaking windows, and the crowd was growing. Things seemed to be surging out of control, deteriorating by the minute. Cavanagh and his top aides gathered with Girardin and police officials at 1300 Beaubien, Detroit Police headquarters.

Complete coverage:1967 riot: Rebellion and unrest

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Detroit '67: 'The shotguns were loaded,' rookie cop recalls

Their first task was to get more officers on the streets, on a day that is normally low-crime and the lightest deployment of the week. Girardin was also worried that the 12th Street ruckus might be a diversion for a planned attack on the east side — the big Detroit Edison power plant and city water works on the river, the Belle Isle police dispatch center and many Chrysler facilities.

“Our strategy was to use the forces we had to contain the situation in a small area until outside assistance arrived,” Girardin said afterward, referring to the Michigan State Police and the National Guard.

Among the looters was then-18-year-old LeeRoy Johnson, who recently recalled the atmosphere: “We saw people running in and out of stores. They were wild on 12th Street.

“People were coming out of businesses, the pawn shops, everything, with all kind of items, they had just go in there and take it, the police standing there don’t even try to stop ’em,” Johnson said in an interview with the Detroit Historical Museum Oral History Project. “So we started looting. We continued to loot up and down 12th all the way to Davison.”

The blind pig

The disturbance began with a police raid on a blind pig — an illegal bar — at 9125 12th St., at the corner of Clairmount, on Detroit’s near west side. It was an entirely routine procedure carried out by a vice-squad cleanup crew, whose duty was to bust illegal drinking, gambling or prostitution operations. Police had conducted several other raids that week with no incidents, and they'd busted 9125 12th St. before without a problem.

The blind pig, also known as the United Community League for Civic Action, was on the second floor of Economy Printing at 9125 12th Street in Detroit. A police raid on this illegal bar and gambling joint sparked the 1967 Detroit uprisings.

At the club, a plainclothes officer bought a beer, and uniformed cops broke in through a locked door. To their surprise, they saw 85 customers and staff, about six times more than they expected. Loading them into paddy wagons and and transporting them to the 10th (Livernois) Precinct took more than an hour. But even at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, people gathered on busy, rowdy 12th Street, which in the blocks south of Clairmount was a well-known sin strip where gambling, prostitution and illegal clubs flourished.

Bystanders joked at first with the bar patrons in custody, but the banter turned angry, and the crowd got rowdy. Crowd members targeted the mostly white cops, who were despised in the black community after decades of abuse.

One agitator on 12th Street, later identified as Michael Lewis, an autoworker, stood out with his green outfit and puffy sleeves, not an unusual ensemble in Detroit in 1967. Cops called him Greensleeves.

“Why do they come down there and do this in our neighborhood?” Lewis shouted to the crowd.

Another rabble-rouser, by his own account, was Bill Scott III, the son of William Scott II, principal owner of the blind pig. The elder Scott and his daughter, Wilma Scott, a waitress, were arrested the night of the raid. In 1970, Bill Scott — then a University of Michigan student — self-published a memoir of his activities in July 1967. He hated the Detroit police and stood outside the blind pig that night, watching and taunting.

“Are we going to let these peckerwood (expletive)  — come down here any time they want and mess us around?” he shouted.

“Hell, no!” people yelled back.

Scott claims he threw the first bottle. It shattered on the sidewalk. A line of police moved toward the crowd, then backed away. As the cars drove off, bottles, bricks and sticks flew through the air, smashing the windows of departing police cars.

“For the first time in our lives, we felt free,” Scott wrote. “Most important, we were right in what we did to the law.”

The rebellion was under way.

Windows started breaking on 12th Street. Scott said he threw a litter basket through the window of Hardy’s Drug Store, a black-owned establishment.

"Why would Negroes want to tear up their own business places?” the owner later asked a Michigan Chronicle reporter, a question that would be repeated often in the coming days and is even heard today.

As dawn approached on a hot and sticky night, burglar alarms began clanging, adding to the bedlam of sirens, shouting and shattering glass. People were running in every direction.

A festival atmosphere

Girardin ordered cops to seal off Belle Isle, where the 1943 race riot had begun. That two-day riot, which included hand-to-hand combat between blacks and whites, left 34 people dead. 

But Girardin and Cavanagh took a controversial approach in those early hours in 1967.

Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, left, and his police commissioner, Ray Girardin, in 1967. Discussing how the riot affected him as mayor, Cavanagh said: "I was sure of myself, got praised, and now I can't guarantee anything."

Even as more police personnel reported for duty — 1,122 officers were on the job by midmorning — police did little to stop the pandemonium on 12th Street. They were following what they believed were directions from superiors, and ultimately, Cavanagh, to use restraint. Badly outnumbered, officers conducted a sweep of the street, but the maneuver did nothing to control the crowd. Then they tried to isolate the area by erecting a perimeter. That also failed to work, and by 1 p.m., the crowd had swelled to about 10,000. Many were looting as police stood by.

Felton Rogers Jr., a 26-year-old rookie cop, was among those sent to 12th Street on a bus. He said officers were issued riot gear and loaded shotguns, but told not to shoot the looters.

"As we approached, we could hear the burglar alarms going off constantly," Rogers recalled. "We pulled up and it was a scene that you just couldn’t imagine. Windows were shattered and glass was out in the street. Merchandise from people looting was everywhere. There were tons of people just milling around.’’

A festival-like feeling took hold along 12th Street. People carried stolen goods through the broken doors and shattered display windows of the street’s many stores.

In the first several hours after daylight, police did not shoot anyone, made few arrests and did not use tear gas. Meanwhile, the crowds grew, rowdiness continued and looting spread, the stolen goods ranging in size from from shoes to sofas. Lots of liquor was taken.

Barbara Perryman, a college student in 1967, drove with her boyfriend to 12th Street from her Detroit home to see what was happening.

“Just standing around watching people,” she told an interviewer. “They're breaking windows out and all — and I couldn't get over this — and then milling around.

“So I turned around and looked in the grocery store. I said, ‘God, look at all those cookies on that shelf. Sure would like to take some cookies back to school.’ Next thing I know, some guy I did not know came up to me. ‘Here are your cookies!’ "

Conrad Mallett Jr., the future chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court whose father, Conrad Mallett Sr., was a top Cavanagh aide, was a 13-year-old Free Press paperboy on 12th Street that Sunday morning, pulling a wagon and walking Hamlet, his Airedale terrier.

“I saw a guy come out of a clothing store with 10 hats on his head, literally in a stack,” Mallett said.

Congressman John Conyers, Detroit Democrat, uses a bullhorn as he tried to encourage African Americans in Detroit's riot area to go home, July 23, 1967. He was met with shouts of "No, no." As Conyers stepped down a rock hit the street a few feet from him.

Many establishment black leaders fanned out through the neighborhood, pleading for calm. U.S. Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit Democrat who was then 38 and in his second term in Congress, climbed onto a car on 12th Street before noon Sunday with a bullhorn, asking the crowd to “stay cool.” Crowd members shouted him down, and someone threw a rock, which hit a cop. Conyers and his driver, civil right activist Arthur Johnson, were forced to flee.

“You try to talk to those people and they’ll knock you into the middle of next year,” Conyers said later.

The first fire broke out in a 12th Street shoe store at 8:24 a.m., and fire crews battled it with no harassment.

By early afternoon, blazes raged out of control up and down 12th Street, spreading to Grand River Avenue, and it felt like someone was squeezing a bellows on the city — temperatures were in the high 80s, and 15-m.p.h. winds whipped the flames and spread the embers. The city smelled like smoke for miles, even in areas where no fires raged. Charred paper scattered in the wind and fell on distant neighborhoods. 

“I could hear the people screaming. Sirens filled the air,” John Lee Hooker, the late legendary blues singer who lived in Detroit, sang in “The Motor City Is Burning,” his post-riot song.

At some fire scenes, residents helped firefighters stretch hoses. At other places, members of the crowd pelted fire personnel with rocks and bottles and stole hoses off the trucks. At one point, the fire department radio dispatcher relayed a command from the chief to all crews operating without police protection:

“Orders are to withdraw. Do not try to put out the fires. I repeat…”

“A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold,” said the post-riot report from the government’s bipartisan Kerner Commission, which conducted an extensive investigation into Detroit’s tumult. “It appeared to one observer that the young people were dancing amid the flames.”

Looting spread to nearby Linwood and Dexter avenues, crowded with stores like 12th Street.

A media blackout and rumors

By early afternoon, with mayhem under way for about eight hours, Detroiters still had no official word that an extremely serious civil emergency was unfolding. Cavanagh and other leaders made no announcements, and they asked radio and television executives to sit on the story, arguing a media blackout would help them gain an upper hand.

 Until late afternoon, when CKLW-TV in Windsor broke the embargo, rumors raced among Detroit’s 1.5 million residents as thick columns of black smoke rose over the west side. Many of the 34,623 fans at Tiger Stadium for the Tigers-Yankees doubleheader could see the smoke in the distance above left field.

Broadcaster Ray Lane told historian Tim Kiska that Tigers General Manager Jim Campbell phoned with one instruction: “You are not, I repeat not, under any circumstances, to refer to the smoke over the left-field fence." Late in the second game, an announcement inside the stadium told fans to avoid certain streets, but did not provide an explanation.

Martha Jean (The Queen) Steinberg is pictured here at WJLB, one of Detroit’s black-oriented stations in March of 1967.

 By late afternoon, news of the riot was all over TV and radio. Most notably, WJLB-AM, one of Detroit’s black-oriented radio stations, on which Martha Jean (the Queen) Steinberg, ministers and officials spent hours pleading for calm. 

In the vacuum of official information, people in well-off neighborhoods — from Detroit’s Boston-Edison district to the Grosse Pointes, which share a long border with the city — passed along stories that rampaging African Americans were heading to burn down their homes. Blacks in the riot area heard that a young man had been bayoneted and left on the street to bleed to death, which was never confirmed.

The disturbance generated fear all over: Normal life across Detroit came to a halt. Residents in besieged areas turned off their lights and got onto the floors of their homes, to stay below windows and out of reach of errant bullets. Black and white homeowners across the city and nearby suburbs moved their cars up their driveways and got their guns. Police in Dearborn and Grosse Pointe Park stood guard at their city’s borders with Detroit.

Donald Lobsinger, a well-known anti-communist zealot who led a pugnacious group called Breakthrough, gathered gun-wielding acolytes at his home near Chandler Park, fearing Detroit’s many leftists would use the chaos as a cover to attack him. None of his adversaries appeared.

At the Fox Theatre on Sunday afternoon, Martha and the Vandellas was the headline act of a “Swinging Time Review” hosted by CKLW-TV’s Robin Seymour. Theater officials interrupted the Vandellas’ set and halted the show once they learned how dangerous Detroit’s streets had become. Martha Reeves explained the situation to fans, and they left the theater calmly.

Political tests

The growing unrest tested Cavanagh, an ambitious Democrat, and Republican Gov. George Romney like nothing had before.

Romney — who was planning to run for the Republican Party nomination for president in 1968 —  and the mayor dithered in calling in the National Guard and Michigan State Police, partly because they feared being damaged politically if the public perceived they had lost control of Detroit.

But as the day wore on, it became increasingly apparent that Detroit was out of control, and the disturbance was growing by the hour. At 2:05 p.m., Girardin finally requested help from Michigan State Police. At 4:10 p.m., Romney called in the National Guard after he had received Cavanagh’s official request.

The disorder was rapidly spreading far beyond the near west side. By 4:30 p.m., firefighters had abandoned a 100-block area along 12th Street, waiting for state police or national guard protection. On Linwood Avenue on Sunday afternoon, the 68-year-old owner of a shoe repair store, Krikor Messerlian, who was barely 5 feet tall, grabbed a saber and attempted to defend a neighboring dry cleaners from a group of looting youths. After he cut one of the looters, another member of the gang beat Messerlian with a 30-inch piece of wood. Messerlian died four days later.

Late Sunday afternoon, Cavanagh and other officials met at the 10th Precinct with black community leaders and neighborhood activists. Asked why it took so long to call in the guard and state cops, Cavanagh said: “Because they’re all white. We’re leery about that.”

The mayor added: “We don’t want another Newark here,” referring to the recently concluded disturbance in the New Jersey city in which 26 people died.

At the meeting, some Detroit residents and black officials complained about the restraint shown by police in the early hours, arguing a stronger reaction could have ended it. Cavanagh defended the city, saying there simply were not enough officers available to make a difference.

Cavanagh declared a 9 p.m.-5:30 a.m. curfew, and ordered the closing of bars and gas stations. The tunnel and bridge to Canada were shut down.

Gov. Romney (right) declares a state of emergency while Mayor Cavanagh listened.

 

Trying to get a handle on the size of the problem, Romney flew over Detroit between 8:30 p.m. and 9 p.m. and gazed down into the hazy, wet heat in horror.

“It looked like the city had been bombed on the west side,” he said. “Entire blocks in flames.”

At 9:07 p.m., the first sniper fire was reported. Then people started dying.

‘A riot of police against blacks’

The first reported death came just seconds after midnight Monday, heralding a day of escalating violence and confusion. Hamid Audish Yacoub, cruising around the neighborhood of Fourth and Temple in a 1965 burgundy Mustang, spotted Walter Grzanka, 45, coming through the broken window of Yacoub’s looted market. Yacoub fired a shot through the open car window and hit Graznka, who died 25 minutes later. In his pockets, Graznka had seven cigars, four packs of pipe tobacco and nine packets of shoelaces.

Sheren George, a 23-year-old mother of two and pregnant with her third child, was riding in the center of the front seat of a car with her husband and two brothers when a bullet ripped into her chest. The shot, from an unknown gunman, came from outside the car, at Woodward and Melbourne, about 11:30 p.m. Sunday. She was rushed to a hospital, where she died a couple of hours later. George was white; she and family members had just dropped off two black friends at Woodward and Grand Boulevard and were returning home.

“Since there was this trouble, we thought Woodward would be safest,” said her brother, Paul Dimitrie.

At 3:30 a.m. Monday, John Ashby, a 24-year-old Detroit firefighter, was severely burned by a high-voltage wire. He died Aug. 3.

National Guard arriving on Lynwood in Detroit.

 

Before dawn on Monday, 800 state police officers and 1,200 Guardsmen had arrived in the city. Several thousand more members of the National Guard were on their way. The looting had now spread to 7 Mile and Livernois on the north and to Kercheval and Van Dyke on the east.

Nine people died of gunshots during daylight Monday, and many were wounded as bullets flew wildly in many neighborhoods.

At 4:30 p.m., at Baldwin and Harper, a red and white Oldsmobile 98 roared into an alley. Out jumped a 24-year-old white man, Richard Paul Shugar, armed with a shotgun. While Shugar owned no store, he accused a black man, Nathaniel Edmonds, 23, of looting and fired a shot, killing Edmonds. Shugar was later charged with murder.

Detroit police, exhausted after working dangerous, 12-hour shifts and frustrated after being ordered to hold back Sunday, went on the offensive Monday. Officers shot 19 looting suspects, killing seven black men, and making more than 2,000 arrests that day alone.

In Detroit, as in some 150 other cities that experienced violence in 1967, “what had begun, to some degree, as a riots against police, became, in some degree, ‘a riot of police against blacks,’” wrote University of Michigan history professor Sidney Fine.

National Guardsmen patrolled Linwood Avenue at Hazelwood on the first day of one of the worst weeks in Detroit's history in July 1967.

 

With the National Guard and police having little effect on the trouble, Republican Gov. Romney reached out to Vice President Hubert Humphrey in Washington at about 2:15 a.m. Monday to discuss using federal troops. Aides to Romney and Democratic President Lyndon Johnson — hamstrung by the political ambitions of their bosses — worked on the details of a deployment for several hours. Late Monday, Johnson ordered 4,700 crack paratroopers into Detroit as guardsmen and police battled snipers across the city.

It is so extraordinary to send in the U.S. Army for a local law-enforcement matter that the president went on national TV at midnight Monday to explain.

“The fact of the matter is law and order have broken down in Detroit, Michigan,” Johnson said.

“The city is an asylum,” wrote Jimmy Breslin, the famous New York Daily News columnist, who had traveled to Detroit to cover the story.

Near the epicenter, on Taylor near 12th, Katie Thomas lived in fear.

“It was like the whole world was on fire,” she said. “Twelfth Street was burning. Guns were going off and electricity was popping. I couldn’t sleep. I just laid there and cried.”

Federal troops arrive

Federal troops began taking back the streets of the lower east side in large numbers about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, some 10 hours after they arrived at Selfridge Air Base and 46 hours since the unrest had begun. Upon their arrival, their commanders, Lt. General John Throckmortin and Col. A.R. Bolling, observed “a city saturated with fear,” according to the Kerner Commission report.

Federal troops land in Selfridge Field, Michigan after President Johnson ordered them to help quell race riots in Detroit, July 24, 1967.  About 5,000 troops were called in.

 

“The National Guardsmen were afraid, the residents were afraid, and the police were afraid. Numerous persons, the majority of them Negroes, were being injured by gunshots of undetermined origin. The general and his staff felt that the major task of the troops was to reduce fear and restore an air of normalcy,” the report said.

Shirley Davis, who was 19 in 1967, felt that horror when she saw tanks roll into her street as her southwest Detroit neighborhood became a battlefield.

Tanks take to the streets during the Detroit Riot in1967.

 

“Tanks! I had never seen a tank before in my life. I thought they came to shoot us, or to blow our houses up,” she told a Detroit Historical Museum interviewer. “I mean actual tanks. Big giant guns. And you’re sitting there and your heart is beating and you don’t know if you’re gonna live or die.”

About 40% of the paratroopers were Vietnam veterans and nearly 25% were African Americans. The troops’ diversity, skill, no-nonsense demeanor, knack for public relations and strict discipline separated them from the trigger-happy weekend warriors in the old, ill-fitting National Guard uniforms. The Army quickly subdued Kercheval, Van Dyke, Vernor, Charlevoix, East Grand Boulevard, Mack and other east-side streets. But not every neighborhood east of Woodward was calm.

During the night hours early Tuesday and Wednesday, snipers seemed ubiquitous on both the east and west sides. At Lawton and Carter, a vicious battle between snipers and law enforcement unfolded around the darkened home of Lloyd Stone, a 49-year-old autoworker, who crawled across his living room floor as gunfire banged up and down his street.

“Get in the house! Get back!” shouted a police officer over a loudspeaker, warning residents to seek cover.

“They’re crazy,” Stone told a reporter. “That’s the only word for it. I haven’t seen anything like this since the Army.”

While hidden assassins were one of the lethal dangers during the week, analysis during and after the riot concluded many of the gunshots that police and the National Guard took for sniper fire were rounds fired by their colleagues blocks away. Detroit police and guard troops often fired first and asked questions later; the Kerner Commission report cited buildings placed under siege by authorities “on the sketchiest reports of sniping.”

Julius Dorsey was a 55-year-old security guard at a fruit market near his home by the Belle Isle Bridge. Two men and a woman approached him after midnight on Monday and ordered him to let them loot the market. Dorsey refused, and a standoff ensued.

Dorsey fired his gun three times into the air, scattering the looters, and they broke into a nearby store. Neighbors, thinking the looters were armed, called police. When police and Guardsmen arrived, they chased the looters northward, firing their guns. The looters escaped, but the bullets hit Dorsey, and he died.

On Tuesday night came a horrific example of misguided shooting during the assault on a building at 12th and Euclid. National Guard troops were on alert because they believed their 2½ ton tank had come under sniper fire. One Guardsman saw the flash of what he thought was a weapon in a second-floor apartment window, so he responded with the tank’s .50-caliber machine gun. Bullets slammed into the chest of 4-year-old Tonia Blanding, killing her and nearly severing the arm of her aunt. The flash the guardsman saw in the darkened apartment likely was Tonia’s uncle striking a match to light a cigarette.

Pallbearers carry the tiny casket of Tonia Blanding, 4, a victim of riots in Detroit, Tuesday, August 1, 1967. The girl was killed as a hail of police and National Guard bullets swept an apartment building where she huddled on the floor. Officials said the flare of a match used to light a cigarette was mistaken for the flash of a sniper's gun.

 

“They shot all through the building,” a young, unidentified black man told WXYZ-TV the next day. “They even ran through the building and shot up through the floors. After they took us out and put us on the street, they talked about how they should kill all of us.”

On Wednesday, in an attempt to flush out suspected snipers, Detroit police and National Guard members fired more than 80 rounds into the Harlan House Motel, on the John Lodge Service Drive near West Grand Boulevard. One guest, Helen Hall, a 50-year-old businesswoman from Connecticut, stood at a fourth-floor window, telling her companions to come look at the tanks. A slug hit her in the heart and killed her instantly.

The Algiers Motel

Also Wednesday, sniper fire was reported around the Algiers Motel, a ramshackle establishment at Woodward and Virginia Park with a reputation for drugs and prostitution. Detroit cops, state police, National Guard soldiers and a security guard stormed the motel.

The Manor House, circled, where three young men were found slain in late July 1967. It is a three story home turned into an annex for the Algiers Motel, 8301 Woodward Avenue in Detroit.

 

No weapon was ever found, nor evidence that any snipers had been hiding in the motel — though one of the guests might have fired a starter’s pistol during horseplay. By the time law enforcement personnel departed, three young black men — Carl Cooper, 17; Fred Temple, 18, and Auburey Pollard, 19 — were dead. Several of their friends, plus two white women from Ohio, had been assaulted during a chaotic and brutal lobby interrogation.

The killings became the most infamous episode of the week, a symbol of the uprising’s ruthlessness, especially after it was determined that two of the victims had been shotgunned at close range.

The bodies of three shooting victims are removed from the Algiers Motel in midtown Detroit, July 26, 1967. The three black men were found shot to death in a room of the motel. It was determined if they were victims of snipers who were active during the throughout the riot-torn city at night.

 

John Hersey, an internationally famous author in that era, described the killings in his 1968 book, “The Algiers Motel Incident.” Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar Award-winning director, uses the Algiers as the focus of her film, “Detroit,” scheduled to have its world premiere at the Fox Theatre on Tuesday and open nationally Aug. 4. Danielle McGuire, a critically acclaimed author and former Wayne State University history professor, is writing a book on what happened at the Algiers.

The police “really freaked out,” in the motel, McGuire said: “By the end of the chaos…all evidence pointed to an execution, rather than some kind of shootout between snipers and the police.”

A regional trauma

The violence subsided gradually. Sniping continued to bedevil police and National Guard troops on the west side, especially in the 12th Street area, but the 505 riot-related incidents from 6 p.m. to midnight Wednesday were about half the number of Monday night, 984. The east side, patrolled by paratroopers, was relatively quiet.

“I think we have the city under control,” Throckmorton, the paratrooper commander, said Wednesday.

One outbreak of gunshots from snipers that took place about 4 p.m. Wednesday around 12th and Clairmount momentarily trapped an unlikely sightseer — Orville Hubbard, the longtime mayor of Dearborn, who was known for his strident segregationist views. Hubbard, in a two-car convoy, was making a tour of the riot areas, accompanied by a Dearborn police inspector with a Thompson submachine gun and a reporter from the Dearborn Press, among others.

As the shooting continued, the Hubbard party sped away. Looking at a young black man walking down a street, minding his own business, Hubbard was quoted as saying, “Look at that guy over there. I think he’d shoot you for two cents. You can tell they just hate whites.”

Earlier, at a news conference, Hubbard had pledged that Dearborn police would “shoot on sight” any rioters who happened to cross the city’s long border with Detroit.

“When you have mad dogs running loose, you’ve got to bring them under control with brute force,” he said.

In Detroit, police shot a white looter Wednesday who was stealing from an auto parts store north of Hamtramck. On the west side, Albert Robinson, a 38-year-old factory worker, died when police and guardsmen said snipers were shooting from Robinson’s apartment building. Authorities claimed Robinson was a sniper, but witnesses disagreed. No weapons were found in the building. Rumors spread that a Guardsman had bayoneted Robinson as he lay wounded on the ground, but an autopsy showed no such wounds.

Walter Evans, who lives on Pingree St. on Detroit’s West Side, patiently waters his lawn, July 27, 1967 to keep it green in front of his home which was spared from fires set by rioters. Next door are the stark ruins of his neighbor’s home burned by a fire that swept almost the whole residential block.

 

By Thursday, much of the city was calm for the first time in five days. Many Detroiters and suburbanites were exhausted, sad, scared, confused and angry. And they also were curious about what had happened. Such large crowds and cars jammed 12th Street and other battered neighborhoods Thursday that Romney felt forced to reinstate the 9 p.m.- 5:30 a.m. curfew to control traffic and allow cleanup crews access.

The sights of soldiers, tanks, streets glittering with glass and smoking piles of rubble where busy businesses once stood were so much more harsh in person than on TV, and the images left many people feeling disoriented and ill.

The stats startled the world: 43 dead (33 African Americans and 10 whites); 1,189 injured; 7,231 arrests, of which 14% were white; 2,509 stores looted or burned; and 3,034 calls for fire department service. Of all structure fires, perhaps as many as 27% took place in black-owned businesses, according to historian Sidney Fine.

“The catastrophe which has struck Detroit is a disaster by any reasonable definition of that term,” Romney said.

On Thursday, Cavanagh assembled at city hall 500 Detroiters, from Henry Ford II, UAW President Walter Reuther, department store chief J.L. Hudson Jr. to numerous community and neighborhood leaders. The mayor would appoint Hudson, then 35, to lead a city rebuilding committee, which would become New Detroit Inc.

“We had to have something like this to wake us up to the fact that we have a revolution going on,” said Anthony Locricchio, an antipoverty activist. “We knew this would be bad, but we didn’t know it would be this bad.”

Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers Union (at podium) pledges the help of his union in the rebuilding of the ravaged arms of Detroit, July 27, 1967 to the applause of Gov. George Romney, right. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh is at center, Cyrus Vance, next left, President Johnson's personal emissary and Lt. Gen. John Throckmorton, the military commander of the city, left.

 

Reuther, one of the era’s most liberal and influential labor leaders, had counseled presidents Johnson and John F. Kennedy and directed UAW funds to help finance the civil rights movement in the South. He delivered a passionate speech at the city hall meeting, summoning the hope that many Detroiters were searching for.

“What are we trying to do with this thing we call the American Dream?” Reuther asked the crowd. “We are trying to build a society in which we can harmonize the diversity — the many splendored diversity — of the human family, of all kinds of people, and to weld them into a sense of unity and solidarity.

“This has never been done before. There are no blueprints that we can lift out of the history books, because no other people have ever had the challenge, or the opportunity. There is little we can do about yesterday. But there is much that we can about tomorrow.”