October 14, 2004
BY DAVID CRUMM
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
GETTING IT STRAIGHT: The Free Press corrects all errors of fact. On July 24, 1967, two articles about the Detroit riot incorrectly reported its origin as a clash with police at 9215 Twelfth Street. In fact, the illegal after-hours club where the clash took place was farther south at 9125. And the anger that exploded that night had been simmering for a long time.
Today, there is not so much as a historical marker in the little park at Twelfth Street and Clairmount on Detroit's near-west side, the spot where one of the worst racial disturbances in U.S. history erupted on a summer night.
That's the rule, not the exception, when anger spills over in this country. Unlike elaborate memorials that help Americans reflect on the roots of the Civil War, the decimation of American Indian tribes and the imprisonment of Japanese Americans in World War II, most of the nation's deep scars are simply left to heal -- or to fester -- as restless Americans move on with their lives.
In metro Detroit, the 37-year-old wound has never healed, said scholars, pastors and community leaders whose lives were shaped by the riot. That's mainly because two different stories sprang from the fires and bullets that ripped apart the city. And, to this day, very different memories echo in the responses to racial issues across southeast Michigan.
"Just ask a group of white people in the suburbs what they know about the riot," said Neal Shine, who was the Free Press city editor in 1967 and now teaches journalism at Oakland University. "Memories are fading. Young people are only vaguely aware of it -- like asking them about World War I. But ask, and you'll hear this story."
Memories of the riot among white people tend to sound like this:
Detroit was doing well economically until that week when black looters angrily trashed the city, shot at police and soldiers, burned hundreds of buildings and ushered in an era of rage between the city and suburbs that has never entirely cooled.
After all, that's what the Free Press reported that Monday morning, the day after the riot started in 1967.
"They're burning themselves out," was the opening line in one story on July 24, referring to what the city's black residents seemed to be doing to themselves. There was "spreading Negro sniping" in Detroit, the Free Press reported. And the newspaper flatly declared that black Detroiters were unanimous in insisting: "Race has nothing to do with this."
Thomas Sugrue, the University of Pennsylvania historian whose book "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" summarizes years of research on the nature of the riot, said, "I think it would be a great idea if someone proposed a national historic site for the 1967 riot.
"I can just hear the debate now," he said. "People wouldn't want it. Detroit boosters would accuse it of pulling down the image of the city -- and white suburbanites would say it's an absurd waste of government money to honor a bunch of criminals and miscreants."
During the last decade, Sugrue has visited Michigan many times and lectured about the riot to diverse audiences. "I talk about all of the problems African Americans were facing through the 1950s and 1960s that contributed to the riot.
"Then, the reaction is always the same. Black people in the audience come up to me and say, 'That's right.' They've remembered these things through their families. But white people will stand up and angrily tell me, 'You're wrong! Those things never happened.' "
At Wayne State University's Center for Urban Studies, research director Kurt Metzger said this lingering division is the single biggest roadblock to reviving Detroit and building a healthy partnership with its neighbors.
"People are still using the excuses that came from the riot for staying out of Detroit and rejecting any responsibility for the problems left behind in Detroit," he said. "A lot of people in the suburbs don't even want to know about the other side of the story of the riot -- the history of housing discrimination, the abuse by a segregated police force, the pressures that built up."
Memories of the riot among black Detroiters sound like this:
For years, cross burnings and other hate crimes in Detroit had bottled up black families in pockets of substandard housing, while many employers fled to the suburbs and a nearly all-white police force brutally tried to quell discontent.
In a summer of riots that scarred several major U.S. cities, tempers finally spilled over in Detroit. The trigger was a hot night, when white police dragged 85 black people away from an after-hours party for a pair of returning Vietnam War veterans and tried to load them into police vans. The pushing and shoving drew a crowd. Soon, bottles were thrown at police. That night, the breaking of bottles escalated into the smashing of store windows and widespread looting. Bricks, bottles and fists soon flew at police.
Then, the arrival of thousands of soldiers, from seasoned U.S. troops to poorly trained, trigger-happy members of the nearly all-white Michigan National Guard, led to a bloodbath and the inability of terrified white firefighters to stop the raging fires. A few black people may have shot back, but rumors of widespread sniping were false.
Working quietly in archives and university research centers over many years, scholars have concluded that that's not a biased version of the story. It's pretty close to exactly what happened.
However, it wasn't until 1989 in a book that was never widely read, "Violence in the Model City," that University of Michigan historian Sidney Fine distilled the problem to one shocking statistic.
Historians already knew that most of the 43 deaths during the riot were tragic mistakes, but they wondered: How could so many lethal errors have happened? What Fine documented was this: On the city's east side, Army troops were more disciplined, fired only 202 rounds of ammunition and were linked to few tragic shootings. The National Guard, however, was concentrated on the west side, where the bulk of the carnage occurred. Guard units unleashed 155,576 rounds.
Shine, recalling the chaos of trying to cover the riot, said, "We never should have believed the commanders in Detroit. They said there were snipers out there, and we believed them. What really was happening was that they were shooting up the city."
Kurt Luedtke, who worked for Shine that week dispatching reporters, said, "It was almost impossible to tell what was happening day to day. Things would flare up at night, then be quiet all the next day. We'd think it was over, then it would start again that night."
The journalists made mistakes but certainly were not careless. Both Shine and Luedtke went on to run the Free Press. After leaving the paper, Luedtke won an Oscar in 1986 for writing the movie "Out of Africa." These were smart people, swept up by the fury around them.
"It was absolutely surreal in the black community, as well," said the Rev. Edgar Vann Jr., now pastor of Second Ebenezer Baptist Church in Detroit and one of the city's most politically influential religious leaders. "It was terrifying. This army was camped in our streets, shooting people."
That summer, Vann was 12 and his father, the Rev. Edgar Vann Sr., who died in 1996, was the pastor of a church on Linwood near the heart of the fires.
"I remember him telling my mother that he had to go over and open up the church so the people who'd been burned out would have a safe place to go. And she objected very strongly. She thought he'd be killed, too," Vann recalled. "I always went everywhere with my father, but she wouldn't let me go to the church. There were fires. Sirens. Shooting.
"This city was a powder keg blowing up. I am not surprised that people did not understand the narratives of what was happening that week."
Stories about the riot began changing almost as soon as the ashes cooled, but it was unclear whether the traumatized population was even paying attention.
Among the first to rewrite the riot's history was the Free Press, because one of the central missions of U.S. newspapers is the continual correction of the record of American life, even when mistakes are painful to admit. The Free Press won a Pulitzer Prize for its 6-week investigation into all 43 riot-related deaths. The conclusion was that most deaths were tragically unnecessary and many of those killed were innocent bystanders. The rumors of widespread sniping were false.
In the scramble to write about the most urgent wounds, however, other parts of the story were largely ignored. Reporters never noticed, until now, that the newspaper incorrectly reported the location of the after-hours club.
Journalists also did not stop that summer to examine the earthquake rippling through the Jewish community, which already was reeling from the May 1967 war in which Arab countries attacked Israel. The riot blazed hottest in an area of the city that was closely connected to Detroit's Jewish history.
Brenda Rosenberg, now a Jewish interfaith activist in southeast Michigan, was a manager at the Saks Fifth Avenue on Second near Grand Boulevard in Detroit that was looted soon after the riot started. She first saw the smoke of the riot from an airplane window as she and her husband flew home from a trip that Sunday.
"I saw the smoke and it felt to me like the world had gone crazy," she said. "With the war in Israel and then the riot, it felt like the world was coming to an end."
Not until this month did it come to light that another community was deeply affected on the Sunday that the riot started.
Hundreds of Muslims from across the Detroit area had planned a picnic at the Michigan State Fairgrounds and, because radio and TV stations agreed to black out news of the riot for most of the first day, these families went ahead and gathered with their children.
"We had no idea what was happening. No one told us," said Eide Alawan, now a leading spokesman for Muslim groups in metro Detroit. "I left the picnic with my wife, who was pregnant, and a 15-month-old son, and we drove right into it."
Moving slowly through the streets, the family saw smoke rising from buildings and black men loomed in their windshield, but they were allowed to pass slowly through the otherworldly scene. Their lingering fear was not of black Detroiters, but of the military force that engulfed the city.
"Our fear that week, as we watched the tanks move in was: When would the Army come for us as Muslims?" Alawan recalled. "We talked about that. We felt isolated. Who was there for us to talk to -- to bring people together?"
That's another of the ongoing missions of U.S. newspapers. In an era when town squares are giving way to regional strip malls and conversations between Americans are both speeding up and breaking down, newspapers remain a constant public forum where, in the course of a week, people come together from around the world to share their stories.
So, 37 years after the riot, the Free Press invited five of the people whose lives were shaped by it to meet for a conversation in the park where the illegal, after-hours club once stood.
Alawan told his story to Shine, Rosenberg, Metzger and Vann, who had never heard about the Muslim picnic before last week.
"I do remember that news blackout," Shine said. "That was a ... dereliction of the news media's responsibility to inform the public. Because of the blackout, your people had no idea and they held their picnic."
"No one told us not to," Alawan said.
"Well," said Shine, shaking his head, "we probably weren't paying any attention to your community back then."
The five sat on benches in the park with a Free Press reporter and spent an hour examining 1967 photographs from the newspaper's archive.
"Look at this! White faces -- all white faces in the Army and the police and the Guard," said Rosenberg, shuffling through dozens of photos. In one, a white soldier points his rifle at unarmed black youths. "Just look."
"You mean to tell me you didn't understand this part of the story?" asked Vann, sitting next to her on the bench.
"Not until I'm seeing it like this," she said.
The most stunning image was of John LeRoy, a black man lying bleeding in the street from a hail of National Guard bullets. He was out after curfew on the third night of the riot, helping a friend get home, because the friend's wife was nine months pregnant.
Alawan sat silently, staring at the photograph. A man with a pregnant wife, a friend simply trying to get home -- except that LeRoy never made it through the gauntlet. He died three days after he was shot.
Alawan passed the photograph to Rosenberg. She paused over it, too. "We need to have more people talk about this," she said.
"Yeah, we're a pretty small circle here in this park, aren't we?" Vann said.
Alawan rose and turned to the reporter. "But you can put this in the newspaper, can't you? And other people will read about what we've said here, right?"
The reporter nodded.
"I'm glad," he said. "I wonder what people will think about all of this."
Contact DAVID CRUMM at 313-223-4526 or crumm at freepress.com.
READERS RESPOND
* Why such anger in America? <http://www.freep.com/voices/letters/eanger14_20041014.htm >
* Americans are not as angry as you think <http://www.freep.com/voices/letters/eango14_20041014.htm
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Thousands of people in metro Detroit recall the 1967 riot. How has the riot's legacy shaped life in southeast Michigan? Do you see signs of hope for breaking down lingering barriers? E-mail our spirit at freepress.com or call 313-222-1456.