I was ten years old and standing on the roof of our house with my father during the Detroit riots watching large swaths of downtown burn. My father had a .455 British Webley strapped to his hip. A little something that he brought back from WWII. Up and down the block, neighbors were sitting on their front porches with various combinations of hunting riffles and shotguns. No rioters ever came to our neighborhood. Instead, they burned out their own sections of town. No surprise there.
After that, all of the white folks moved out of Detroit. You can see the results for yourself. After 35 years of Democratic/Socialists/Exclusively Black Rule, Detroit is done. The greatest industrial city in the history of mankind is now a pitiful shell. This has always been a lesson to me. Thugs, rioters and punks always go for the easy pickings. Keep your powder dry my friends.
I was in Washington DC during the riots.
Like you said the rioters burned their own neighborhood down.
Washingtons small Chinatown was only 3 blocks from the burning buildings on 7th. street N.W., not a window was broken in Chinatown.
Was that the 1967 riots in Detroit?
During the black riots I was working for Burroughs Corporation, then headquartered in Detroit and while there witnessed one of our secretaries killed by a stray bullet.
My wife and two kids were back in PIttsburgh and when I returned home my wife laid down an edict.
We were moving out of the city. Period.
We bought a home in a neighboring county and never looked back.
The next black riot will see ten of thousands of white people with guns, resisting the rioters.
One of my most vivid childhood memories is tied to the Baltimore riots. We lived waaaay out beyond the burbs, but a little brawl fired up in our town anyway. A couple stores had fires set and a street was briefly blocked. I didn't see all that because I was just a little kid. What I did see was my grandfather methodically loading M1 carbine mags on the dining room table. A shotgun was staged at each entrance and I was carefully forbidden to even go near them. I was futher forbidden to play outside or on the sun porch. My mom was beside herself because dad was in the National Guard and we thought he had been called up for armed patrol in Baltimore. It was a very scary day. As it turned out, nothing happened. The local nonsense petered out on its own and dad wasn't called up because he was on nuclear duty at the time (Maryland ANG controlled the Baltimore Nike missile bases).
Twenty-five years later I was surveying in Baltimore and the crew drove through a burned-out block. I was shocked when the party chief told me that those buildings has burned in the riots when I was a kid. They were still standing in the ninieties, untouched and uninhabited. It was eerie.
Interesting to remember who the Governor was then.