Twelve Hours on Twelfth Street: The 1967 Rebellion

In the early morning hours of Sunday, July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-seven, Detroit police raided an unlicensed after-hours bar on the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmount Avenue. These places were called blind pigs. The one on Twelfth Street was hosting a party for two Vietnam veterans returning home. The police expected to find a dozen people inside. They found eighty-five.

While police were making arrests on the sidewalk, a crowd gathered. Someone threw a bottle. A store window broke. By dawn, the block was burning.

What followed over the next five days was the most destructive urban uprising in twentieth-century American history. Forty-three people died. More than fourteen hundred buildings were burned or damaged. Seven thousand people were arrested. Approximately eight thousand National Guard troops and four thousand seven hundred paratroopers from the Eighty-Second and One Hundred First Airborne Divisions were deployed in Detroit. Tanks moved through residential streets. The fires were visible for miles.

The Kerner Commission, formed by President Lyndon Johnson to investigate the disorder, concluded the following year that the primary cause was not criminal opportunism but systematic racial inequality: discriminatory policing, redlined neighborhoods, exclusion from economic opportunity, and the deliberate concentration of poverty in a city the white middle class had largely abandoned for the suburbs. The commission's summary is among the most direct statements a federal body has ever produced about structural racism: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal.

The Twelfth Street corridor, renamed Rosa Parks Boulevard in two thousand three, is still largely vacant. The city has not fully recovered the population it had in nineteen sixty-seven. The Kerner Report's recommendations, including federal investment in housing and economic equity, were not enacted. President Johnson received the report and largely set it aside.

What happened here was called a riot by city officials and a rebellion by the people who lived in the neighborhood. The difference in language is a difference in the question being asked. The riot framing asks who threw the first bottle. The rebellion framing asks what built the pressure until a blind pig raid on a Sunday morning could produce five days of fire.