The 1943 Race Riot

Belle Isle sits in the Detroit River, a park of roughly a thousand acres connected to the city by a bridge. On the evening of June twentieth, nineteen forty-three, a fistfight broke out on the Belle Isle bridge between a group of Black and white young men returning from the island. The fight was brief. The city was not.

Within hours, rumors were moving through both communities, and each was a different story. In the Black community, the rumor was that a white mob had thrown a Black woman and her baby off the bridge into the river. In the white community, the rumor was that a Black man had raped a white woman on the island. Neither story was true. Both spread through neighborhoods already under pressure and found people ready to act on them.

Detroit in June of nineteen forty-three was a city stretched to its limits. The wartime industrial boom had brought hundreds of thousands of workers, Black and white, into a housing market that was structurally segregated. Black migrants were confined to Black Bottom. The Sojourner Truth housing project, built to house Black defense workers, had triggered a riot by white residents in nineteen forty-two when the city tried to open it. The pressure had been building for a year.

The riot that followed the Belle Isle fight lasted thirty-six hours. Thirty-four people died. Twenty-five of them were Black. Seventeen of the twenty-five Black deaths were at the hands of Detroit police. Federal troops arrived and ended the violence. A grand jury was convened and did not indict a single police officer.

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Johnson to investigate the nineteen sixty-seven disorders, looked back at nineteen forty-three and found the same conditions: segregated housing, discriminatory policing, economic exclusion, and the accumulated pressure of inequality without recourse. Twenty-four years separated the two events. The underlying causes were not different.