US:A week of rioting engulfed deprived areas of Detroit in 1967. Kevin Boylewitnessed the crisis and says the causes have still to be addressed
On a sultry Sunday 40 years ago this week, the Detroit police raided an after-hours bar at the corner of 12th and Clairmount Streets, in a poor black section of the city's west side. A crowd gathered to watch, the way it always does when it's too hot to be inside.
In their rush to finish the operation, the cops got rough with some of their prisoners, pushing and shoving and wielding batons. A few onlookers started tossing insults, followed by bottles and stones. On the edge of the crowd, a teenager launched a rubbish can through the window of Hardy's chemist. Someone else set a shoe shop ablaze.
Within an hour, the melee had escalated into a riot - a rebellion, some said later - that raced like wildfire across the central city.
June 24th, 2007, was another sultry Sunday in Detroit. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was the perverse pride of an entrepreneur defending the business he had built. Whatever.
When Dier Smith ripped off a local drug dealer, the man responded with stunning force. As Smith raced down Calvert Street, the dealer drew out his AK-47 and opened fire.
Smith escaped, but the hail of bullets hit three bystanders. The adults survived. A little boy, 16-month-old Keith Wallace, didn't.
It's a short walk from Calvert to Clairmount, an easy stroll along seven blocks of boarded-up stores and weed-choked lots where buildings used to be.
Between those two streets, though, lies a catastrophic failure of national will. As terrifying as the rioting was, it created a moment of opportunity as Americans were forced to face the racial divisions and economic inequalities that ran through their cities. Four decades on, the divisions remain. The determination to confront them has long since slipped away.
Detroit was neither the first nor the last great urban upheaval of the 1960s. Los Angeles's Watts had burned in 1965, Chicago's west side in 1966, the inner cities of Tampa, Cincinnati, and Newark in 1967.
After Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis in the spring of 1968, rioting broke out in more than 100 other cities, including Washington DC and Baltimore. But Detroit was the worst, a week-long conflagration so fierce it killed 43 people, injured hundreds and destroyed huge swathes of the city's most impoverished neighbourhoods.
Standing alongside 12th Street's smouldering ruins on the riot's final day, Detroit's mayor thought the area looked "like Berlin in 1945".
I was six years old that summer, living in a lower-middle-class white neighbourhood far from the riot's epicentre. To this day, though, I remember the fear that descended over my home and my block: how parents rushed their kids inside before dark, the gunfire and the constant distant wail of sirens.
A lot of whites fled to the suburbs in the riot's aftermath: about 80,000 in 1968 alone. (The city's population dwindled from 1.6 million in 1960 to fewer than 900,000 today.) After the riot, my family didn't join the rush - not for 11 years, anyway. Although I left Detroit to pursue an academic career, I've spent much of my life writing about its tortured racial history.
To do that, I've come back time and again: to talk to people, to dig in archives, to drive the streets, to think. I suppose I just want to understand what happened that week in 1967 in the city I still think of as home.
In retrospect, Americans should have seen the riot coming. Since the 1920s, not just Detroit but all of the nation's major cities had restricted blacks to the oldest, most decrepit neighbourhoods. Segregation inevitably spawned discrimination: schools in African-American areas were overcrowded and underfunded; city services were delivered sporadically; policing was frighteningly oppressive.
Then, in the 1950s and 1960s, the urban black economy tumbled into crisis as factory work started to disappear - from 1947 to 1967, Detroit lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs. In the ghetto, unemployment skyrocketed. Poverty intensified. Life on the streets became more dangerous. There were 112 murders in Detroit in 1946; in 1966, twice as many.
And the crisis of the inner cities struck as much of the nation's economy boomed, creating a dazzling world of colour TVs, backyard barbecues and cars the size of luxury liners. Poor blacks could see it all on display in the new suburbs that necklaced central cities.
But suburbia was white man's territory, and it was fiercely defended. Just a month before the Detroit riot, white thugs killed a young black man, a Vietnam veteran who had the audacity to linger in a suburban park after dark. So African-Americans had no choice but to stay on the far side of the urban colour line.
No wonder Clairmount Street exploded. And no wonder the riot's signature act wasn't battling police - though that's how it started - but looting and burning shops. Policymakers didn't understand. "What happened?" a shaken president Lyndon Johnson asked on the day he appointed the Kerner Commission to investigate.
It would have been easy for it to equivocate, to blame black hoodlums or radical agitators. Instead, it gave a searingly honest answer. "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal," it reported in March 1968. "Discrimination and segregation . . . now threaten the future of every American."
But Johnson's appointees also believed, in classic American fashion, that the nation could right itself. "The movement apart can be reversed," they insisted, though doing so would be extraordinarily difficult. The federal government had to shatter the institutions that fostered neighbourhood segregation. City schools had to be integrated and dramatically improved.
For a few years, policymakers tried - imperfectly, half-heartedly - to break down the ghettos' walls. Congress banned discrimination in housing. The Supreme Court ordered city school desegregation, even if that meant busing kids from one end of town to another.
And the Nixon White House extended nationwide a small, innovative programme called "affirmative action".
It wasn't nearly enough to pull the urban poor into the mainstream of American society. But it was a start. The percentage of Americans living below the poverty line declined in the early 1970s. And partly because of affirmative action, the black middle class began to expand.
Then, in the late 1970s and 1980s, the national commitment to the urban poor unravelled, destroyed by a furious white backlash and a resurgent conservatism that vilified big government and sanctified the free market.
With that shift in American politics, hope gave way to neglect. It has been 30 years since the federal government really invested in America's inner cities. The only time anyone talks about segregation is when the Supreme Court prohibits another school district from employing the mildest of racial remedies. The welfare state has been eviscerated - not expanded.
And on the streets of Detroit and in other urban cores, life grows inexorably grimmer.
Detroit has its glittering new ballparks and trendy loft apartments to draw the well-to-do back from the suburbs.
Yet downtown developments don't address the tangle of problems that beset Detroit's dispossessed.
Half a century after deindustrialisation began, the city continues to haemorrhage jobs. Detroit now has an unemployment rate higher than any other major US metropolitan area, with joblessness exceeding 50 per cent in its poorest sections. One-third of Detroit's people - and half of its children - live below the poverty line. Its infant mortality rate is only a bit better than that of the West Bank.
Neighbourhoods are still profoundly segregated, far closer to apartheid than to anything approaching racial balance. The school system is almost completely segregated and frighteningly ineffective: only 22 per cent of Detroit's kids graduate from high school.
The drug trade flourishes, fuelled by young men who see it as the best (and maybe only) entry into America's consumer paradise. And the body count climbs. More than 20,000 Detroiters have been killed since the summer of 1967, 203 of them in the first half of this year.
Inner-city Detroit isn't alone. Cleveland's poverty rate is higher. Memphis's infant mortality rate is worse. Though Detroit is the most segregated city in the United States, Milwaukee, Newark and New York don't trail far behind.
And after a decline in the late 1990s, the brutal, senseless violence that policymakers pledged to stop 40 years ago is again on the rise in poor neighbourhoods across urban America.
It's not the violence of 1967, of course. Nowadays there are no thick black curls of smoke rising above 12th and Clairmount, demanding the nation's attention. Today's violence is hidden away: a petty crime on Calvert Street; a burst of automatic fire; a little boy lying in a pool of blood.
And except for the family and friends who are left to grieve his loss, no one gives a damn. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)
Kevin Boyle teaches American history at Ohio State University and is the author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age