Twenty-Five Black Dead on Belle Isle Bridge

The fistfight on the Belle Isle Bridge started on the night of June twentieth, nineteen forty-three. Belle Isle is the island park in the Detroit River, and on warm summer nights in wartime Detroit, it drew thousands of people from across a city running at full industrial capacity and near the breaking point on everything else.

By the morning of June twenty-second, thirty-four people were dead. Twenty-five of them were Black. Seventeen of those twenty-five were killed by police. Nine white people died, none at the hands of police. More than four hundred thirty people were wounded. Over one thousand eight hundred were arrested. President Franklin Roosevelt ordered federal troops into Detroit, the first use of federal forces against civilian racial violence since Reconstruction.

The immediate cause was a fistfight. The actual cause was two years of compounding pressure that most of white Detroit had refused to acknowledge. Black workers had migrated to Detroit by the hundreds of thousands to staff the war industries, then been confined by restrictive housing covenants and federal policy to an overcrowded strip of the east side called Paradise Valley while white residents firebombed housing projects where Black families tried to move. Sixteen months before the riot, white Detroiters had rioted to prevent Black war workers from occupying the federally funded Sojourner Truth Homes in a white neighborhood.

The riot of nineteen forty-three was not an anomaly. It was a result. The city that built the Arsenal of Democracy could not build a single integrated neighborhood without organized violence from white residents and federal complicity in their demands.