Difficult as the 1967 riots were for the Motor City, key facts were hidden by leaders pushing their own narrative. Far from being angry and despairing, black families in Detroit that summer earned 95% of white income and enjoyed an unemployment rate lower than the national rate for whites. Groundbreaking black reporters including Louis Lomax, the first African-American TV journalist with a national following, and Sandra West, a UPI reporter who lived in the riot zone, wrote that the destruction was instigated by professional out-of-town operatives. Blacks and whites set fires together, watched stores burn together, went to jail together. The first sniper arrested by police was white. Congressman John Conyers tried to calm the situation, telling his fellow black residents to stop looting and go home, and had his office torched for his trouble. These are not the characteristics of a race riot. Yet history has been hijacked to paint a picture very different from reality. So, instead of being guided by the truth of the past, cities are subject to being driven into a ditch by revisionism and heresy.
Sounds like the "mostly peaceful" astroturf riots of 2020, and the astroturf protests of 2024. To the left, the issue is always the revolution. Detroit, if it returns to success, will do so because its people will care more about their hometown than the revolution--i.e., making Detroit great again.