TIME MAGAZINE

TIME MAGAZINE

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 niggers 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.