I remember them pretty well although I was not in them. Go look at footage of the LA riots after the Rodney King trial, and multiply those by a small factor, say 2 or 3. Maybe 5. They were kind of terrifying, because there was no imagining the upper limit of how far they might go. There were adjoining blocks in Detroit which were afire all at once, and that’s certainly nothing we are used to seeing. And, remember, TV coverage in 1965 was quite larval compared to what it might be today in terms of coverage. I lived in NJ, and maybe 12 miles outside of Newark, which was quite run down and indeed had some rioting, but nothing at all like Detroit. Detroit never recovered. I am not sure one could say that about any other city where riots occurred. Certainly some cities lost maybe 15 years...not forgetting that 10 years after 1965 was the middle of the 70’s which was quite a crappy era in many ways.
During the Rodney King riots, I saw a thug being arrested by cops for assaulting and perhaps killing someone in the street. The newsperson shoved a microphone into the perp’s face and he shouted at the top of his lungs,
“Don’t mattah what I did, I’m a good person.”
And there you have it. Self-esteem training.