1967 Detroit Riot - Social Conditions

Social Conditions

Detroit was regarded by many in the United States as a leader in race relations during the early 1960s. The election of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh in 1961 brought reform to the police department, led by new Detroit Police Commissioner George Edwards. Organized labor, led by UAW President Walter Reuther, planned major redevelopment for inner-city slums. The New York Times editorialized that Detroit had "more going for it than any other major city in the North."

In the early 20th century, when blacks moved to Detroit in the Great Migration, the city had a rapidly increasing population and not enough housing. Blacks were strongly discriminated against in housing and jobs, as they competed generally for lower scale work with rural white southern migrants, as well as immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Some of the patterns of racial and ethnic segregation (which was also based in the differing religions of the Americans and Europeans), persisted after other social discrimination had eased by the mid-20th century.

By the 1960s, blacks had advanced into many better union and professional jobs. The city had a large and prosperous black middle class; higher-than-normal wages for unskilled black workers because of the auto industry; two black congressmen (half of the black Congressmen at the time); three black judges; two black members on the Detroit Board of Education; a housing commission that was forty percent black; and twelve blacks representing Detroit in the Michigan legislature. Nicholas Hood, the sole black member of the nine-member Detroit Common Council, praised the Cavanagh administration for its willingness to listen to concerns of the inner city. Weeks prior to the riot, Mayor Cavanagh had said that residents did not "need to throw a brick to communicate with City Hall."

Detroit had acquired millions in federal funds through President Johnson's Great Society programs and invested them almost exclusively into the inner city, where poverty and social problems were concentrated. The Washington Post claimed Detroit's inner-city schools were undergoing "the country's leading and most forceful reforms in education." Housing conditions were not viewed as worse than those of other Northern cities. In 1965, the American Institute of Architects gave Detroit an award for urban redevelopment. The city had mature black neighborhoods such as Conant Gardens. In the early 20th century, waves of new immigrants and migrants had generally settled in areas founded on an ethnic base. As Paul Wrobel writes in Our Way: Family, Parish, and Neighborhood in a Polish-American Community, ethnic communities in Detroit like Poletown, Chaldeantown, Corktown, Mexicantown, and Greektown are ubiquitous. In May 1967, the federal administration ranked housing for blacks in Detroit above that of Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, and Cleveland.

The Department of Justice's Office of Law Enforcement Assistance designated Detroit as the "model for police-community relations". Fortune, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Look, Harper’s, U.S. News and World Report, and The Wall Street Journal all published positive articles on the city; Mayor Cavanagh was so highly regarded nationally that he was elected to head the Conference of Mayors and the National League of Cities. He had been re-elected in 1965 with 69% of the votes. Although Cavanagh alienated many when he ran a failed attempt to earn the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate in 1966, the city was proud of defusing a possible riot situation on Kercheval Street in 1966. Officials believed that police were capable of handling potential riot situations.

According to Violence in the Model City by University of Michigan's Sidney Fine, many African-American residents were dissatisfied with social conditions in Detroit before July 23, 1967 and believed that progress was too slow. After the riot, the Kerner Commission reported that their survey of blacks in Detroit found that none were "happy" about conditions in the city prior to the event. The areas of discrimination identified by Fine were: policing, housing, employment, spatial segregation within the city, mistreatment by merchants, shortage of recreational facilities, poor quality of public education, access to medical services, and "the way the war on poverty operated in Detroit."

The riot was a form of protest designed to call attention to the condition of blacks, to extract concessions from the city's authority structure at the same time rejects the view that the upheaval had a political dimension.

But deprivation of access to political power was one of the conditions that shaped the lives of Detroit blacks, was part of the configuration of circumstances that fueled the anger of black people.

Due to the riots 1967 certainly were a major factor in securing the future changes in which black Detroiters came to play a much more prominent role in the police force and city government generally.