The Riot That Destroyed Detroit For Decades
43 Dead, $50 Million Property Damage, 1/2 Million Leave City
On this day in 1967, the Detroit Riot started and became the third worst riot in American history (behind the 1863 New York Draft Riot and the 1992 L.A. Riot). Five days later, 7,000 people had been arrested, 43 people were dead, 342 injured, nearly 1,400 buildings had been burned causing $50 million dollars of property damage, and 5,000 people were homeless. Some 7,000 National Guard and U.S. Army troops, including paratroopers, patrolled the streets in tanks and armored carriers.
The riot started when police raided a “blind pig”, an illegal after-hours club. 85 patrons were inside to celebrate the return of two servicemen from Vietnam. A small crowd gathered as police began to herd the patrons into paddy wagons. Soon there was a crowd of 200 yelling at the police as they tried to maintain order.
Per the Detroit Free Press, the riot started when the owner of the club threw a bottle at the police – and missed:
William Walter Scott II, was the principal owner of the club, an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling joint. His older sister, Wilma, was a cook and waitress. The night was hot and sticky, and the crowd’s initial teasing of the arrestees devolved into raucous goading of police as they became more aggressive, pushing and twisting the arms of the women.
“You don’t have to treat them that way,” Bill Scott yelled. “They can walk. Let them walk, you white sons of bitches.”
By the time the wagons were full, the crowd had swelled, the taunts had grown more hostile and, though police manpower was thin early Sunday, several scout cars responded to the scene. Cops stood at the ready in the middle of 12th Street, billy clubs in hand, forcing the throng back on the sidewalk.
Scott, tall and lean, mounted a car and began to preach to a crowd long accustomed to the harsh tactics of the overwhelmingly white Detroit police in black neighborhoods: “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherf—— come down here any time they want and mess us around?”
“Hell, no!” people yelled back.
Scott walked into an alley and grabbed a bottle, seeking “the pleasure of hitting one in the head, maybe killing him,” he remembers thinking. Making his way into the middle of the crowd for cover, he threw the bottle at a sergeant standing in front of the door.
The missile missed, shattering on the sidewalk. A phalanx of police moved toward the crowd, then backed off. As the paddy wagons drove away, bottles, bricks and sticks flew through the air, smashing the windows of departing police cars. Bill Scott said he felt liberated.
“For the first time in our lives we felt free. Most important, we were right in what we did to the law.”
The rebellion was underway.
Looting and fires started soon thereafter. By the next morning, every Detroit police officer and firefighter was on duty, reinforced soon thereafter by the state police, the National Guard, and U.S. Army troops.
The city, which once had a population of million, would lose nearly 500,000 residents as people fled to the suburbs over the next few decades.
Some people believe the abandoned and destroyed building shown in the recent picture below is the location of the club where the riots started.
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