July 1967: What the Uprising Was Really About
Near Grand Rapids, Michigan
On the night of July twenty-fifth, nineteen sixty-seven, Grand Rapids police raided an unlicensed bar on the city's near northeast side. In the process of clearing the bar and making an arrest, officers tackled a young Black man to the ground in front of a gathering crowd. People began throwing rocks and bottles. By morning the city was in an uprising that would last three days.
The disturbance came only days after Detroit's much larger rebellion had drawn national attention. Grand Rapids shared the same underlying conditions: a Black community dealing with severe housing segregation driven by redlining practices that had operated openly since the nineteen twenties, chronic underemployment concentrated in the most dangerous and lowest-paid factory work, and a police force that the community experienced as a source of harassment rather than protection.
Weeks before the uprising, police had intensified crackdowns on drug and prostitution activity in Black neighborhoods. The official report produced afterward was careful in its language: the events constituted a protest against what it called forms of neglect, deprivation, arbitrary control, and abuse, not a riot in the conventional sense.
An estimated one thousand people participated, both Black and white. Forty-four people were injured. No one was killed. Property damage ran to approximately five hundred thousand dollars. Governor George Romney sent in the Michigan State Police, who had just come from suppressing the Detroit uprising.
Nearly one hundred eighty African Americans were arrested during the three days. No major policy change followed immediately.
What did follow, slowly, was political change. Lyman Parks, a minister at the First Community AME Church, was elected to the Grand Rapids City Commission in nineteen sixty-eight, the first African American to hold that office. In nineteen seventy-one, when the sitting mayor resigned, Parks was selected by his fellow commissioners to fill the vacancy and became Grand Rapids' first Black mayor. He served until nineteen seventy-six.
