The Long Hot Summer: Toledo's Nineteen Sixty-Seven Uprising

The summer of nineteen sixty-seven was one of the most turbulent in American history. Across a hundred and nine cities, Black communities, pressed by decades of housing discrimination, police brutality, and economic exclusion, erupted in what historians call the Long Hot Summer. Toledo was among them.

On the night of July twenty-third, nineteen sixty-seven, the same night unrest began in Detroit, groups of young people in Toledo began moving through several neighborhoods, breaking windows, looting stores, setting fires. The underlying causes had been building for years. Toledo's African American residents faced systematic exclusion from better-paying industrial jobs, redlining in housing markets that confined them to deteriorating neighborhoods, and police practices widely experienced as hostile and violent.

Dorr Street, the commercial corridor that was the center of Black Toledo, bore significant damage. The records here do not give us a precise accounting of every building lost or every person hurt in those nights. What they show is a city that, like hundreds of others in that era, had failed to address the structural conditions that made an uprising possible.

Toledo mayor Frank Strich imposed a curfew. National Guard troops were mobilized. The unrest subsided within days. But the underlying questions did not go away. The nineteen sixty-seven riots in Toledo, as in Detroit and Newark and dozens of other cities, generated official inquiries and promises of reform. Progress was uneven and slow.

The Kerner Commission, appointed by President Lyndon Johnson after the summer's wave of unrest, concluded that the United States was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal. Toledo grappled, as every American city did, with how seriously to take that finding. The answer, in most places, was: not seriously enough.