1967 Newark Riots
The 1967 Newark Riots were a major civil disturbance that occurred in the city of Newark, New Jersey between July 12 and July 17, 1967. In the period leading up to the riots, several factors led local African-American residents to feel powerless and disenfranchised. In particular they had been largely excluded from political representation and often suffered police brutality. Furthermore, unemployment, poverty and concerns about low quality housing contributed to the tinder-box. This unrest came to a head when a black cab driver named John Smith was arrested for illegally passing a double-parked police car and brutally beaten by police who accused him of resisting arrest. A crowd gathered outside the police station where he was detained, and a rumor was started that he had been killed while in police custody. (Actually he had been moved to a local hospital.) This set off five days of riots, looting, violence and destruction — ultimately leaving 23 people dead, 725 people injured and close to 1,500 arrested. Property damage exceeded $10 million. The riot is often cited as a major factor in the decline of Newark and its neighboring communities, as many of the city's residents fled to the suburbs immediately following the riots.
Detroit Riots:
The 12th Street Riot in Detroit began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, after vice squad officers executed a raid at an illegal after-hours drinking establishment (colloquially referred to as a blind pig) on the corner of 12th Street (today also known as "Rosa Parks Boulevard") and Clairmount Avenue on the city's near westside. This evolved into one of the most deadly and destructive riots in modern U.S. history--far surpassing the disturbances which broke out in the city during 1943--and eclipsed only by those riots occurring in Los Angeles during 1992. In 1967, the Detroit Police Department's Tac Squads, each made up of four police officers (predominantly white), had a reputation among the black residents of Detroit for harrassment and brutality. While the city of Detroit still had a white majority in 1967, it had gained a black majority by the early 1970s. On that summer Sunday morning, the officers had expected to find only a handful of individuals in the bar, but instead there were 82 people celebrating the return of two local veterans from the war in Vietnam. Despite the large number, police decided to arrest everyone present. A crowd soon gathered around the establishment, protesting as patrons were led away. After the last police car left, a group of angry black males, who had observed the incident, began breaking the windows of the adjacent clothing store. Shortly thereafter, full-scale rioting began throughout the neighborhood, which continued into Monday, July 24, 1967, and for the next few days. Despite a conscious effort by the local news media to avoid reporting on it so as not to inspire copy-cat violence, the mayhem expanded to other parts of the city with theft and destruction beyond the 12th Street/Clairmount Avenue vicinity. National Guardsmen were deployed to quell the disorder and their numbers had swelled to some 8,000 within 48 hours, but their presence only fueled more violence. Willie Horton— black Detroit resident, and popular Detroit Tigers baseball player—arrived after a ball game, and stood on a car in the middle of the crowd wearing his baseball uniform but could not calm them, despite his impassioned pleas. U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-Michigan) likewise attempted to ease tensions but was equally unsuccessful. Michigan Governor George Romney and President Lyndon Johnson disagreed about the legality of sending in federal troops. Johnson said he could not send federal troops in without Romney declaring a "state of insurrection"; Romney was reluctant to make that declaration for fear that doing so would relieve insurance companies of their obligations to reimburse policyholders for the damage being done. Almost 48 hours after the disturbances began, Johnson sent in federal troops from the 82nd Airborne who had earlier been positioned at nearby Selfridge Air Force Base in suburban Macomb County—without a "state of insurrection" being officially declared. The national guard troops were federalized at that time. Contrary to popular belief, black-owned businesses were not spared. One of the first stores looted in Detroit was Hardy's drug store, owned by blacks, and known for filling prescriptions on credit. Detroit's leading black-owned clothing store was burned, as was one of the city's best-loved black restaurants. In the wake of the riots, a black merchant noted "you were going to get looted no matter what color you were." (Thernstrom, Abigail and Stephen. America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible: Race in Modern America. Pages 162-4). Over the period of five days, 43 people died, an additional 1,189 were injured, over 7,000 were arrested, and more than 1,400 buildings were burned. The riot caused an estimated $45 million in damages.[1] Beyond the immediate destruction of a considerable section of the city, the disturbances are thought to have accelerated white flight (and also middle-class black flight) to the surrounding suburbs and led to an increased fear of the city among many suburbanites which continues to this day. Furthermore, Detroit's overall population within the city limits (today more than 80% black) has been sliced in half within the space of five decades. In the 1950 census, there were more than 1,800,000 residents within the city limits, more than three-fourths of whom were white. By the 2000 census, however, there were only about 950,000 city residents—the first time since the 1910 census that Detroit had officially recorded fewer than a million inhabitants—and whites making up less than 15% of the population. As conditions have deteriorated in the city—notably in the performance of its public school system and in its notoriously high crime rate—some of the city's suburbs have become predominantly black, such as the more affluent Southfield in neighboring Oakland County. Many observers trace the dramatically quickened pace of these developments to the 1967 unrest and to public school desegregation orders by federal courts in the early 1970s. Detroit's Mayor at the time, Jerome Cavanagh, a white liberal Democrat, lamented upon surveying the damage, "today we stand amidst the ashes of our hopes. We hoped against hope that what we had been doing was enough to prevent a riot. It was not enough." Reflecting on the riots, Cavanagh's successor, Mayor Coleman Young, wrote: "The heaviest casualty, however, was the city. Detroit's losses went a hell of a lot deeper than the immediate toll of lives and buildings. The riot put Detroit on the fast track to economic desolation, mugging the city and making off with incalculable value in jobs, earnings taxes, corporate taxes, retail dollars, sales taxes, mortgages, interest, property taxes, development dollars, investment dollars, tourism dollars, and plain damn money. The money was carried out in the pockets of the businesses and the white people who fled as fast as they could. The white exodus from Detroit had been prodigiously steady prior to the rebellion [sic], totally twenty-two thousand in 1966, but afterwards it was frantic. In 1967, with less than half the year remaining after the summer explosion—the outward population migration reached sixty-seven thousand. In 1968 the figure hit eighty-thousand, followed by forty-six thousand in 1969." (Hard Stuff, page 179)