I vaguely knew about the 1967 Detroit riots (also called the Detroit rebellion or uprising), since I mentioned them in this post, but I don't think I understood much detail.
Today is the anniversary of their ending, after their onset on July 23. The Equal Justice Initiative calendar for today marks that occurrence with some of the information I was lacking.
The Detroit rebellion began after police raided an after-hours club. Looting and fires broke out, and multiple law enforcement agencies were deployed. On July 26, police and National Guardsmen raided the Algiers Motel looking for an alleged sniper. They found not a single gun on the premises, but instead tortured the Black men and white women they found there together and killed three Black teenagers, shooting two of them with shotguns at point-blank range. Despite two officers’ confessions, no one was ever convicted for their deaths. By the rebellion’s end, 33 African American and 10 white people had been killed, most at the hands of law enforcement.
According to the Wikipedia page for the uprising/riots, the scale of destruction was the worst since the 1863 draft riots in New York City, and it was not surpassed until the 1992 LA riots.
Among the [33] black deaths, 14 were shot by police officers; 9 were shot by National Guardsmen; 6 were shot by store owners or security guards... and 1 was shot by a federal soldier. The National Guardsmen and Detroit Police were found to have engaged in "uncontrolled and unnecessary firing" that endangered civilians and increased police chaos.
The Wikipedia article says the almost-all-white National Guardsmen were inexperienced, while the regular Army troops were multi-racial and Vietnam veterans. Those differences showed up in how they handled the situation (badly, in the case of the Guardsmen).
Of the 10 white people killed, half were civilians, and of those five, two were killed by National Guard and one by a cop.
As Langston Hughes wrote, "What happens to a dream deferred?"
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