Twelve Hours on Twelfth Street

At about a quarter to four in the morning on July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-seven, Detroit police raided an unlicensed bar at the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmount Avenue. Eighty-five people were inside, celebrating the return of Black veterans from Vietnam. The officers made all eighty-five arrests and called for wagon after wagon. The neighborhood crowd that gathered to watch the paddy wagons fill grew quietly at first, then someone threw a bottle.

By midday, the fires had started. By nightfall, units of the Michigan National Guard were deploying across the city. Five days later, President Lyndon Johnson had dispatched federal troops to Detroit, joining thousands of National Guardsmen already in the city, one of the largest domestic military deployments in decades. The final count was forty-three dead, one thousand one hundred eighty-nine wounded, and seven thousand two hundred thirty-one arrested. Roughly forty to fifty million dollars in property damage, a figure that the neighborhoods that burned would spend decades paying for in tax base they no longer had.

The Kerner Commission, convened by Johnson to explain why American cities were burning that summer, delivered its answer the following year in plain language. White racism, the Commission said. Specifically: police brutality, bank redlining, housing segregation enforced by covenant and by violence, and discriminatory hiring in the industries that needed Black labor most. The report warned that the United States was moving toward two societies, one Black, one white, separate and unequal. Detroit was the most lethal example.

Residents who lived through those five days generally do not call it a riot. A riot is random. What happened here, they will tell you, had causes. It had a history. It had a Kerner Commission report that told the government exactly what needed to change, and a government that sent troops instead.

The site of the Algiers Motel, where three young Black men were killed by Detroit police on the third night of the uprising, is two miles south of where you are now.