2: Optimism and Crisis in the New Liberal Metropolis

It is not without significance also that Detroit is the only city with a population of over one million people that has not experienced a large-scaled, racial explosion in the past few years.... I believe this indicates how far we have come in Detroit since the infamous period of the Summer of 1943, when racial hostilities turned our city into an armed camp.1

By 1960, James Johnson Jr. had been in Detroit for seven years, but he still made too little money to live on his own. One of the perks of his new job at the Scotch and Sirloin, however, was that it enabled him to take cooking classes at Chadsey High School. The six-month course cost over $150, and the restaurant deducted the money from Johnson’s paychecks. After completing the course and getting his cooking certificate, Johnson stayed at the restaurant making $80 a week until December 1964, when he had a fight with a waiter named Horace Hunter over a customer’s order. In this altercation, James was convinced that his fellow employee was acting on behalf of the management, which he believed wanted to fire him because he now made more than minimum wage. Johnson felt that he had “been there over four years, [was] always underpaid and was like a worn out shoe.”2 In the heat of the fight with Hunter, Johnson stabbed him in the side with a teninch butcher knife—lashing out for the first time with violence at what he felt was managerial harassment.

Fearing prosecution and feeling generally discouraged with the job prospects in Detroit, Johnson went to Chicago to live with his sister Nancy, who had migrated there instead of to Detroit. When he arrived in Chicago, Johnson got a job in the assembly division of the Jefferson Electric Company, where he made $60 a week.3 In time, he worked his way up to a position as a coil cutter, making $2.60 an hour, but after seven weeks the man who had vacated that better job returned, and Johnson had to return to assembly. Hating the job in assembly, missing Detroit, and hoping that opportunities there had improved, Johnson went back to the Motor City.

Johnson's ever-present hope that he would find a better life in Detroit reflected that of many black motor city residents during this period. Even though the North turned out to be distressingly similar to a South that blacks had fled in droves, the migration process, as well as the growing civil rights activism during the 1950s, fueled a powerful conviction among them that if the North was not the “Promised Land” that African Americans had believed it to be, they now had the political means to make it so.

In 1960, Detroit’s progressive forces began to mobilize across racial and class lines to rid the city of its segregation, poverty, and right-leaning civic leadership. Almost overnight, a powerful biracial coalition managed to transform Detroit into a city where pro–civil rights liberals enjoyed enormous and nationally envied power. After a pivotal mayoral election in 1961, a very different Detroit not only seemed possible; it also seemed probable. As a close look at 1961–67, particularly 1964–67, reveals, however, despite their many dramatic initiatives, Detroit’s new liberal leadership was never able to transform the city to the extent that it had promised its constituents. Racial discrimination and inequality still plagued Detroit, and, not surprisingly, this fact soon generated much citizen disappointment. Even though both black and white liberal leaders valiantly attempted to respond to this disappointment by stepping up their efforts to deal with issues such as deteriorating police-community relations, they made little tangible progress. In time, they faced criticism from every camp. Some Detroiters believed that conservatives should have remained in charge. Others felt that liberals could still succeed if they became more forceful. In July 1967, however, the citizens most deeply disillusioned with their city and the political process spoke the loudest when they set Detroit ablaze. As the Motor City burned in the fires of the 1967 rebellion, the heady optimism that Detroit liberals had felt in 1961 seemed all but impossible to recapture. The city was experiencing its most severe social and political crisis to date.

* * *

As we have seen, black Detroiters had questioned the motives and the policies of civic leaders throughout the 1950s. In 1957, Louis Miriani, a politician even more unsympathetic to the black community than Albert Cobo, became mayor after Cobo’s death, and local African Americans were deeply distressed. City blacks feared that Miriani’s aggressive law-and-order initiatives would soon make their lives even more unpleasant. Indeed, the mayor succeeded in upsetting them from his first days in office. His decision to intensify the police’s presence in the city’s poorest areas in particular, dramatically exacerbated tensions between the DPD and Detroit’s black community. According to the Detroit Free Press, there existed “a profound feeling of dissatisfaction among the Negroes of the community in Detroit which rested on the fact that Miriani’s Police Commissioner had ordered a crackdown against crime. . . . Negroes felt this was aimed directly at them. . . . [T]hey could not communicate with Miriani.”4 By 1961, when Miriani sought reelection, black Detroiters were determined to beat back the racial conservatives who had ruled their city for so long. When Jerome Cavanagh, a political newcomer who not only announced his intention to defeat Miriani but also made his civil rights sympathies clear, entered the race, blacks and white progressives were elated.

Mayor Jerome Cavanagh. Walter P. Reuther, Wayne State University.

Cavanagh, a thirty-three-year-old father of six, was the former chairman of the Wayne County Young Democrats and a practicing attorney.5 He immediately captured the attention of many young Detroiters because they perceived his proposed city initiatives to be “an extension of the ‘New Frontier’ youth movement started by President Kennedy.”6 But his appeal went beyond the city’s youth. Older whites who long had been pushing for a more progressive political agenda in Detroit gravitated toward Cavanagh as a social visionary. Older blacks also seeking a political overhaul were additionally attracted to Cavanagh’s vocal support of civil rights. They had taken particular note of the fact that Cavanagh had unequivocally supported a civil rights amendment intended to give the City Council advise-and-consent powers over the mayor’s appointment to the Commission on Community Relations (CCR). And even when this amendment, crafted by Detroit’s lone black councilman, William Patrick, officially died in a council vote on October 3, 1961, Cavanagh still advocated its adoption.

Black and progressive white Detroiters worked hard together to elect Cavanagh. As both groups well knew, however, the black vote would be the most vital. By 1961, blacks comprised more than one-third of the city’s population and were thus central to Cavanagh’s hopes of capturing the mayoralty. Inspired by Cavanagh’s campaign declaration that “he would clearly define to all his department heads his racial policies,”7 as well as by his oft-stated opinion that “it was time for a new and vigorous administration,”8 Detroit’s black middle class organized a massive get-out-the-vote drive. Black organizations ranging from the TULC to the NAACP to the Cotillion Club to the Wolverine Bar Association of Michigan to the Detroit Interdenomination Ministerial Alliance gave their time and money to this voter registration effort.9 Although several key figures in the black middle class had activist roots to the left of the Democratic party—indeed, some had been members or at least defenders of the Communist Party—the civil rights imperative of defeating Miriani led them to support Cavanagh’s platform. By 1961, it appeared that electing Cavanagh was the most logical way to secure the long-sought goal of attaining greater social, racial, and economic equality in Detroit.

The 1961 mayoral election made it clear that not only was the black vote instrumental in reshaping Detroit politics, but also that a new coalition of the city’s politically liberal black and white residents had become a real force to contend with. In what the Detroit News described as “the biggest political upset here in 32 years,” Cavanagh received 200,413 votes to Miriani’s 158,778.10 Cavanagh had won by a five-to-one margin in “precincts that are heavily Negro.”11 Voting returns revealed as well that many in Detroit’s white working class had also voted for Cavanagh. As the Detroit Free Press put it, “while Cavanagh did well among the large Negro segment of the community, he also did well across the board in many workingmen’s areas of the city.”12 Clearly, Cavanagh had successfully wooed Detroit’s black, as well as a significant portion of its white, electorate into a revitalized liberal coalition. This new liberal alliance made the future of the city look bright for the first time since the Second Great Migration had begun.

During his first term in office, Mayor Cavanagh rode the wave of this new optimism and began seeking concrete ways to improve the city and its ever-tense race relations. Well aware that his success depended on his heeding the needs of all his constituents, Cavanagh encouraged the public’s involvement in shaping civic policy by, among other things, deliberately drawing from many facets of the Detroit community when appointing new leaders to various city agencies.

The mayor’s ability to address such dicey social issues as police-community relations and demographic disruption in the schools without alienating his racially and economically diverse constituents earned Cavanagh a second term in 1965. Cavanagh was most encouraged by the tremendous vote of confidence he received from city residents that year, but he was even more excited by the possibilities for Detroit that he saw in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s ambitious War on Poverty. In such national initiatives, the mayor could see the chance for lasting civic peace—a peace based on unprecedented economic security and equality. The Detroiters who had elected Cavanagh, as well as growing numbers of whites who had not, also were optimistic that the War on Poverty could end city troubles and move their metropolis forward.

From the moment that the Great Society began, it was clear that Cavanagh fully shared LBJ’s conviction that the life of every American citizen would be improved if politicians succeeded in bringing the nation’s poor into the economic and social mainstream. In key respects, however, the mayor was a step ahead of the Democrats in Washington when it came to tackling the vexing problem of urban inequality. According to the United Community Services, “planning for Detroit’s part in the nationwide War on Poverty began with a meeting called by Mayor Cavanagh in April, 1964, six months before Congress was to pass the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA).”13 And as soon as Congress did enact the EOA, liberal leaders in Detroit pushed hard for such projects as Head Start and the Model Cities/Model Neighborhood Project and for a local extension of the Community Action Program (CAP).14 In Detroit, CAP took the form of the City of Detroit Mayor’s Committee, Total Action against Poverty, or TAP. Between November 23, 1964, and August 31, 1966, the Cavanagh administration used its $3,913,298 budget to set up four Neighborhood Community Action Centers and twenty subcenters. Each was intended to be “the points of contact between TAP component projects and the people they are designed to serve.”15 It is significant that the Cavanagh administration was fully committed as well to the “maximum feasible participation” of the community that it served. According to civic leaders, “the poor, themselves, will be hired to help formulate and carry out much of the program.”16

The War on Poverty in Detroit was comprehensive indeed. TAP’s component projects ultimately included “program development, medical, dental and health clinics, home management instruction, homemaker services, cultural enrichment field trips, school community projects, pre-school education, assistant attendance officers, intramural physical education, extended school projects, school retention programs, school preparation programs, educational stimulus centers, and a reading materials distribution component.”17 In addition to these services, TAP centers offered marriage and family counseling, classes for expectant parents, school health examinations, child immunizations, advice on food purchasing and credit buying, and even legal services for the poor.18

Detroiters in need enthusiastically embraced such programs. Between June 28, 1965, and August 27, 1965, more than 24,000 mothers and their children participated in TAP’s education and recreation services. During the same period, 6,000 poor children were enrolled in Head Start programs. And between June 4, 1965, and December 4, 1966, 600 Detroiters completed “on-the-job training” programs.19 In total, between January 1, 1965, and April 1966, more than 93,000 Detroiters had made contact with TAP centers around the city, and these centers had made 113,000 job referrals as well as filed 44,000 requests for medical and dental care.20 Detroiters not only used the TAP centers, but they also received aid in less direct ways through OEO-funded work training services, public school programs, and even programs for the city’s parochial schools.21

Detroit’s Great Society initiatives were more far reaching than anything city leaders had previously undertaken. But what most set these liberal programs apart from previous political and economic initiatives was the degree to which the black middle-class influenced the types of services offered to the urban poor and the extent to which this group was involved in implementing the various poverty programs.

The cooperative relationship between white liberal leaders and Detroit’s black middle class was relatively easy to forge, partly because the city’s newly powerful core of black middle-class liberals understood the “problems” facing poor urban blacks in much the same way that the white liberals of the Cavanagh and Johnson administrations did. While the Detroit Urban League maintain that “Negro families cannot be put together under one label,” as the deeply scarring and degenerative social and economic problems of some blacks “are not the problems of middle-class Negroes or even all lower status Negroes, but they are problems faced everyday by [a] group of disadvantaged Negroes,”22 this organization nevertheless agreed that one of the major problems facing poor urban blacks was that of status and manhood deprivation. As the Urban League officals put it “The low-income Negro family tends to be wife-dominated, the male loses a great deal of is self-respect, and the family loses respect for him.”23 As much of the black middle class saw it, this lack of self-respect in turn generated other serious problems such as the inability to advance in jobs and chronic unemployment. In cyclical fashion, these economic difficulties “gnaw[ed] away at [black] manhood.”24 When the Detroit Urban League published its detailed report on the city’s social ills in 1966, not surprisingly it met with high praise from important white liberals such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan.25

In addition to sharing much of the ideology upon which the Great Society was founded, Detroit’s black middle-class leaders also became actively involved in virtually every War on Poverty initiative. The NAACP and the Urban League were vocal participants in TAP along with the Board of Commerce, city churches, the Department of Education, and the UAW.26 Although the NAACP did not actually sit on TAP’s Policy-Advisory Committee, as did the Urban League, it participated in virtually every TAP program. Detroit’s civil rights leaders were particularly committed to TAP’s various community uplift programs. In TAP’s Operation Bootstrap, for example, two of the four key financial sponsors were Robert Tindal of the NAACP and William Raymond of the Detroit Urban League.27

Although the leaders of Detroit’s black middle class gave almost unqualified support to Cavanagh’s War on Poverty, they nevertheless cautioned the mayor to remember that the city’s problems were as much a product of racial discrimination as economic deprivation. Whereas TAP officials tended to lump all “low-income families” together and tried repeatedly to address the fact that such poor families “spend most of their resources on the bare necessities of survival [with] little left over for clothes, diet and health, bus fare, insurance, toys, and other things which are an everyday part of the lives of most of us,”28 black leaders pointed out that African Americans fell disproportionately into this group. Thus, according to civil rights leaders, administration liberals should insist on certain non-TAP efforts, such as desegregating housing and schools, if they were serious about eradicating inequality. Civil rights leaders were not surprised when the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (CCR) found that the “the median income of nonwhites during 1959 was $4,400, while median income among whites was $7,300 or 66% higher”29 and concluded in 1963 that “the differences between whites and nonwhites [are] much too significant and disturbing to be minimized or ignored.”30

The black middle class was right to call attention to the race-based nature of deprivation in the Motor City. Not only did African Americans remain more disadvantaged economically by the mid-1960s, but in key respects they were also more socially and residentially segregated from whites than ever. According to scholars Albert J. Mayer and Thomas F. Hoult, “In 1930, 51 percent of all Negro residents lived in white or predominantly white areas [but] by 1960, only 15 percent of Negro residents lived in so-called white areas.”31 And whereas Detroit had sixteen all-black census tracts in 1940 and forty in 1950, it had eighty-nine in 1960.32 Unsurprisingly, the all-black census tracts were in need of public assistance to a far greater extent than were the all-white tracts.33

But while the city’s white liberal leaders were well aware that race was a poverty factor and had supported equality measures such as Open Occupancy,34 most felt that their programs in Detroit were sufficiently comprehensive, if not something to be proud of. Such confidence was continually bolstered by positive feedback from outside the city. In January 1965, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce chose Detroit as the site of its upcoming meeting of the Task Force on Economic Growth and Opportunity “because it is representative of a major urban community [that] has taken steps to help solve its problems.”35 After visiting Detroit’s TAP centers in February 1965, Morton Engleberg, OEO director of public affairs, wrote to Robert E. Toohey, Cavanagh’s special assistant, to say that he was convinced “if every city follows Detroit’s example, the War on Poverty will soon be won.”36 Daniel Patrick Moynihan went even further in his praise of the liberal experiment in Detroit when he noted the same year that “Detroit had everything the Great Society could wish for in a municipality,” including two black congressmen as well as “a splendid mayor and a fine governor.”37 According to Moynihan, Detroit had actually “found the road to racial peace in the programs and policies instituted by Cavanagh, with assistance from the Democratic administrations in Washington.”38

But just as the Cavanagh administration was basking in the glow of national praise, it began to appear that trouble was brewing in paradise. In fact, just when civic liberals felt most confident that their programs were thriving, the city’s historic but theretofore successfully contained racial tensions and political divisiveness again began threatening to upset Detroit’s civic stability. Indeed just as civic liberals grew more committed to their various Great Society and War on Poverty initiatives, many black Detroiters began to question both the pace and parameters of the liberal agenda itself. The fact that the city was still governed, managed, taught, and represented almost exclusively by whites, despite the efforts of the civil rights leadership and the promises of the Cavanagh administration to rectify such imbalances, began to generate much discontent. The political alliance between white progressives and the black community that had put Cavanagh in office itself was fracturing with dire implications for civic peace.39

Not only had many black residents begun to doubt their liberal leaders’ progress, but just as seriously, they had begun to question the wisdom of their own civil rights leadership. As the city’s black civil rights leaders became more wedded to and excited by the Cavanagh administration’s antipoverty efforts, many of their poor and working-class black constituents grew more critical of their involvement in these initiatives. It had not escaped Detroit’s African Americans that even though middle-class black civil rights leaders became involved in every Great Society program and had developed a good relationship with the Cavanagh leadership, brutal discrimination continued to flourish in the city.

But because most poor and working-class black Detroiters still considered the black middle class their voice in city politics, at least initially they expressed their mounting discontent by flooding the offices of civil rights organizations with growing numbers of formal complaints about the inequality that still raged in the Motor City. Indeed, as the 1960s wore on, the NAACP began receiving hundreds of complaints from community blacks like Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Wilson, whose son, Harvey, had been harassed repeatedly by a white girl at his school. This girl kept calling Harvey “a black nigger,” and when he had enough and finally kicked her, his white teacher, Mrs. Truaell, slapped him.40 There were also complaints like that of Mrs. Thomasyne Faulkner, who tried to rent an apartment and was told by the owner that “they did not rent to colored.”41

Civil rights leaders handled these complaints expeditiously and aggressively.42 Yet despite escalating black dissatisfaction with Cavanagh’s Great Society initiatives, they did not challenge the pace or perameters of the administration’s plans for combating Detroit’s economic and social ills. No matter how many horror stories they heard from their constituents, these black leaders rarely questioned that the solution to urban inequality could be found within the liberal agenda. Indeed, they had fought too hard and too long for a real political voice in Detroit to relinquish it when the going got tough. Robert Tindal, the NAACP’s executive secretary, spoke for most of the city’s middle-class black leadership when he said that he found “very little solution to the problems other than the ballot box.”43 Even though intimidation still was the modus operandi of many of the city’s most racially conservative whites, black leaders believed that it was morally and strategically important to continue to work closely with the city’s liberal whites.44

Although they continued to hope that Detroit eventually would become an equitable biracial center, Detroit’s middle-class civil rights leaders were not blind to the fact that so little change had taken place after 1964. According to complaints filed with both the NAACP and the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (MCRC), not only were white merchants in the black community still charging exorbitant prices for food and clothing, but white landlords also were continuing to overcharge for housing while white realtors still attempted to relegate blacks to the city’s least-developed and most impoverished neighborhoods. Particularly disturbing was evidence that housing inequities were still one of the most serious problems facing Detroit’s black citizens. Indeed, in certain black neighborhoods where over 44 percent of the residents had migrated from the South, only 14 percent could afford to own their own homes, leaving over 85 percent of them to pay exorbitant rents to discriminatory landlords and real estate firms.45 As the CCR noted in 1966, “houses in changing neighborhoods are marketed exclusively to Negroes,” and “white buyers are diverted from these areas.”46

By the mid-1960s, it also became abundantly clear to the black middle class that little had changed for African Americans in the educational arena. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated education unconstitutional in 1954, Detroit civil rights leaders were optimistic that the city’s public school system would eventually be desegregated. To their dismay, however, every year after Brown v. the Board of Education, Detroit schools had actually become more, not less, segregated. In 1964, when the Cavanagh administration committed the city to the Detroit Program for an Integrated School System,47 black civil rights leaders regained much of their optimism, but by 1966, even they could see that Detroit’s schools remained extremely segregated.48

Black community leaders also could not miss that economic opportunity for city African Americans remained equally elusive despite a booming economy and the numerous War on Poverty programs. Although African Americans had successfully penetrated the unionized labor market (25 percent of the UAW membership was black in the late 1960s, as compared with 14 percent in 1930), they still were not fully sharing the great prosperity to be had in Detroit.49 Throughout Detroit, whites had managed to keep the majority of higher-paying and more prestigious jobs. Indeed citywide, 23 percent of whites were managers, proprietors, officials, semi-professionals, or professionals, as compared with only 9 percent of blacks. Conversely, 40 percent of blacks were categorized as machine “operators,” as compared with 27 percent of whites. Just as significant, 22 percent of blacks, as compared with 10 percent of whites, worked in private households and service positions.50

While many black Detroiters were employed in the least lucrative and desirable jobs throughout the 1960s, many found it exceedingly difficult to get any job at all. According to a Detroit Planning Commission report, by the late 1960s, in one city neighborhood, over 90 percent of the total number of applicants for what residents viewed as “decent jobs” were black, and 96 percent of those applicants were unemployed.51 This staggering black unemployment existed in a city whose overall unemployment rate bottomed out at a 15-year low of 3.8 percent in 1968.52 Barriers to black employment ranged from the outright refusal of local white businesses to hire blacks to the more indirect but equally devastating barriers like the lack of “bus tickets, lunch money, safety shoes, hair cuts, [and] dental work.”53

The cost of this economic deprivation was enormous. Throughout the 1960s, increased numbers of Detroit’s black unemployed were forced onto the welfare rolls. But while the effects of job and housing discrimination had frayed the economic fabric of many black families, the fact that they had been forced to apply for government assistance at the very historical moment when they were most optimistic about breaking free of social and economic oppression was particularly devastating. And, of course, with Detroiters on welfare only receiving $44 per month to cover “food, clothing, school expenses, entertainment, bus fare, personal care, everything,” government aid did not alleviate want.54 As the United Community Services noted, “the use of ‘ceilings’ to limit the amount of assistance obviously prevents numerous families from having their ‘basic’ needs met, under this program. These families may number as high as 50 percent of the total of all ADC families.”55

The city’s black middle class was distressed by the fact that African Americans’ equal access to housing, education, and employment had not improved since the late 1940s. Their expectations of white liberals and the Great Society were not being realized as quickly as predicted. But what quickly turned black leaders’ discomfort with the pace of liberal progress into alarm, was the realization that police-community relations in particular had deteriorated during the 1960s. In fact, it was the actions of the Detroit Police Department (DPD) that would plunge Detroit, which had for years just simmered with discontent, into a full-blown urban crisis.

While many city departments had remained largely white since Cavanagh took office, the DPD remained the whitest of them all. Even though police officers were placed in charge of the safety and stability of the entire community, which was almost 50 percent African American by 1965, only 2.8 percent of the police force was black.56 And in the 1960s, as in the previous decade, even when city blacks did manage to penetrate the ranks of the DPD, white officers routinely made their work lives most difficult. Indeed, harassment of black officers by white had increased noticeably since the 1950s as a marginally higher number of African Americans joined the force. For example, in 1966 the NAACP received a letter from a Mrs. Jessie Wallace in which she expressed her concern “over the mistreatment of patrolman Kenneth Johnson at the hands of his white fellow officers because of his testimony revealing the brutal beating of a 15 year old Negro youth in the Vernor Station Garage.”57 Indicating the prevalence of racial discrimination within the DPD, black policemen on the force felt compelled to form an organization called Concerned Officers for Equal Justice in order to call attention to their plight.

Even more troubling than the DPD’s hiring and personnel practices was its blatant support of white interests over black in the city and its barely concealed animosity toward black citizens. As a political scientist from Wayne State University pointed out, “recruits came into the police department with all of the prejudices, hatreds and hang ups contained in the general population.”58 Cavanagh had attempted to improve police-community relations by appointing a liberal police commissioner, George Edwards, but overall, even his well-meaning efforts failed in the face of officer recalcitrance. According to Edwards, “90 percent of the 4,767-man Detroit Police Department are bigoted, and [a] dislike for Negroes is reflected constantly in their language and often in physical abuse.”59

There were, of course, police officers who did not let personal biases prevent them from fairly and effectively carrying out their duties. However other officers felt very strongly that blacks greatly exaggerated racism in the city as well as within the force.60 A 1969 survey of police officers indicated that as many as 37 percent of white officers believed that blacks were treated the same as whites in terms of housing, 59 percent thought blacks received the same educational advantages as whites, 43 percent thought job opportunities for blacks and whites were equal, and 57 percent believed law enforcement treated blacks no differently from whites. Black officers surveyed did not see things this way at all. Three percent of black policemen thought blacks got the same access to housing as whites, 3 percent thought blacks had the same educational opportunities, 8 percent thought blacks enjoyed the same job opportunities, and 6 percent thought blacks and whites were treated the same way by law enforcement.61

City blacks had much reason to believe that the DPD was a racist organization.62 Indeed leaders of the NAACP felt compelled to note that the police “operate under the bigoted misapprehension that most Negroes are criminals.” Because this organization had “personally investigated and protested numerous episodes of police brutality or Negro citizens which, even when verified by the courts or the Civil Rights Commission, has never resulted in any effective action against the guilty police officer,” it felt more than qualified to speak out on this issue.63 A particularly egregious incident brought to the NAACP’s attention occurred on September 12, 1965, when four African American boys who were playing football in the street were questioned by the DPD, who demanded identification and told the youths to leave the area. When the boys protested, they were arrested and subsequently beaten, kicked, and stomped by at least five white officers in the precinct where they were being detained.64

Despite the Cavanagh administration’s public commitment to reforming the DPD and the valiant efforts of liberal Police Commissioner Edwards to that end, by the late 1960s, Detroit’s blacks had heard one too many tales of friends and relatives being mistreated by the DPD to have much faith in their civic leaders. They knew all too well about incidents like the one that befell two black couples, Mr. and Mrs. James Gray and Mr. and Mrs. George Brezell. The Grays and the Brezells mistakenly had driven down a dead-end street and, as they came to a stop, they were accosted by heavily armed white men who shot at them, saying, “there are no niggers living on this street.” Despite the couples’ report to the police, no arrests were made.65 Many city blacks also had heard about an African American woman named Barbara Jackson who was badly injured when the police decided to arrest her. Regarding Ms. Jackson’s injuries in this arrest, the DPD claimed that she “fell attempting to escape.” Ms. Jackson, however, reported to the NAACP that “the officer picked her up and slammed her to the ground [and] then another officer pulled off her wig and kicked her with the comment ‘now you’re really going to the hospital.’”66 Based on their experiences of the past decade, black Detroiters had every reason to believe that Jackson was telling the truth.

Picketers at Detroit Police Headquarters protesting the fatal shooting of a black woman, July 13,1963. Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Even the wealthiest of Detroit’s African Americans came to speak out against police excess as the 1960s unfolded. In 1965, members of the Cotillion Club, an elite black social organization, noted in a letter to Cavanagh that police-community relations had deteriorated dramatically since 1963, when, in that year alone, “there were almost 500 cases of police-inflicted injuries; and 300 of these were in the five predominantly Negro Precinct areas.”67 Indeed, according to city records, between May 1961 and February 1964, there had been 1,507 “altercations” between the police and Detroit citizens resulting in the injury of 1,041 citizens, most of them black. Of those citizen injuries, 690 were head injuries. In those same altercations, 580 police officers were also injured and, significantly, 303 of those injuries were to the officers’ hands, knuckles, and fingers.68 Despite such alarming statistics, Commissioner Edwards’s successor, Ray Girardin, maintained that “while Detroit’s citizens can be divided into many categories—racial, religious, political, economic—the police will divide them into only two: those who obey the law and those who don’t.”69

The problem for blacks in Detroit was that the police too often equated them with lawlessness. Well aware of this, white liberal leaders took great pains to denounce such an association. As Richard V. Marks, a white liberal in the CCR, wrote, “the ‘crime in the streets’ issue is more than a ‘fact’ stated about white or black criminality. . . . [I]t is in reality a euphemism for hold-the-line government and community policy regarding the Negro struggle for Civil Rights, jobs, etc.”70 Marks went on to state emphatically that black Detroiters were as opposed to crime as were city whites and that they were just “as desperately concerned that there will be proper policing in their communities as any other citizen in our city.”71 Bolstering Marks’s claims, one black Detroiter, Leigins S. Moore, wrote to his local clergyman, Reverend Charles Williams, “we, too, believe in law and order . . . . [W]e do not wish to give any comfort to the hoodlum and law violators.”72 Despite the care that both white liberal leaders and ordinary black citizens took to distinguish between the need to fight crime and the criminal actions of the DPD, the force itself took little notice.

The fact that the DPD was impervious to change only escalated black anger in Detroit. As one black doctor, Thomas Green, wrote to Cavanagh, “as a city physician I have been stopped and questioned any number of times.... [S]ome of my colleagues have had a similar experience. [The police] don’t need any more help or encouragement in that regard.”73 Another black Detroiter questioned city officials this way: “How could you possibly ignore what is common knowledge to every citizen group in the community, and give your unqualified support of an obvious evil that exists in our city?”74 And, as Detroiter Mattie Barrow wrote to Cavanagh in 1965, “Yes, Mr. Mayor, if you can not use your power to stop this unjust brutality against Negro citizens we will have to elect someone who will.”75

From the moment Cavanagh embarked on implementing LBJ’s Great Society, much of his black constituency was losing faith in such an initiative. But the possibilities for the city’s long-term social peace and political stability were compromised not only by black disaffection with liberal programmatic initiatives but also by the fact that the city’s white racial conservatives had become openly hostile to them. Even as poor, working-class, middle-class, and wealthy blacks began to have serious doubts about whether any substantive change was occurring in their city, many white Detroiters, also from every class background, were becoming convinced that too much change had already taken place.

In 1965, an editorial on television station WJBK reflected the growing sentiments of these whites when it addressed civic liberals’ attempts to reform the DPD: “We don’t like the sound of it. The city must be protected, and the police must have the full backing in doing their job, or the community one day might have to go back to the law of the jungle.”76 Just as the Cavanagh administration’s attempt to deal with the police generated the most vocal black criticism of its agenda, so did it raise a flag for racially conservative whites in the city who had either never supported the mayor or had voted for him with a great deal of trepidation given his civil rights sympathies. At the very moment city officials were becoming more critical of the DPD’s actions, many white Detroiters began calling for greater police strength in the face of alleged black criminality. Because the local media routinely presented crime news in a way that emphasized black participation, white conservatives saw any censuring of the police as giving the green light to black hoodlums.77 Indeed, these whites came openly to question the motivations of the city’s liberal leadership when it took on the DPD, suspecting that it was actually encouraging lawlessness.

By the mid-1960s, as city blacks began filing complaints against the police, Detroit’s racially conservative element began openly criticizing Cavanagh’s reform efforts. As one particularly passionate critic A. Rahrig wrote to the mayor, “we whites are getting sick! Sick! Of the crying do gooders, NAACP-etc. That are always on the side of the person who robs, kills, or beats a person to death just for kicks.”78 George Gerhold opined in his letter to the mayor, “believe me, without police protection our civilization will go back to jungle law and cannibalism in a very short time.”79 And E. Vick complained that “I don’t hear much about improving the morals and behavior of the young Negroes on the part of the so-called Civil Rights groups who are constantly complaining about the police.”80 A letter to Cavanagh from a policeman’s wife in 1965 best sums up the growing conservative suspicion that the mayor was chipping away at needed police strength. She specifically cautioned Cavanagh not to “further weaken the protection of Detroit’s citizens against the daily rapes, robberies, knifings and murders by lawless members of the Negro community . . . . With the black man’s switchblade at their throats, the white community wants a strong, resolute force of well-trained police officers.”81

Just as the liberal administration’s stand against police brutality generated quite virulent attacks from Detroit’s conservative white community, its other War on Poverty initiatives soon fueled serious discontent as well. As Elma N. French wrote to Cavanagh regarding the city’s “poverty program and the government training programs,” blacks “are staying on government aid for generations . . . . [T]hey can see all the movies they wish, buy all the booze they can consume and most of them have a car.” She went on to warn the mayor that “tomorrow they will make similar demands on the school board, then the various city, county, state and national offices—until they have the balance of power locally and nationally . . . . God help the white man when the Negro gets control.”82 Another white woman, Pauline Ford, shared French’s fears that blacks wanted to take over the Motor City and that the mayor was facilitating their goal. As she wrote to Cavanagh, “surely you know by now that it is impossible to please the Negroes . . . . [I]f you bow to the Negroes, no self-respecting person could vote for you.”83 Another anonymous letter to Cavanagh was even harsher about his policies: “well, have you found you have let the Nigro Situation get out of hand, and what you gona do about it—Bear down or GIVE UP and let them take over... [W]e are promised a GHOST city by 1975.”84

As conservative white Detroiters began speaking out against the Cavanagh administration, so did certain white politicians such as Councilwoman Mary V. Beck. Beck had been popular with many city whites since her initial election to council in 1953, and she, like her electors, became increasingly critical of the mayor as the 1960s progressed. In 1967, Beck took the audacious step of trying to recall Cavanagh hoping to oust him from office or at least get him to alter his political course. To Cavanagh’s tremendous relief, however, black and white liberals in his administration and within the very-powerful UAW stood by him. In Cavanagh’s defense, union leaders stated that “the UAW, therefore, strongly urges that the citizens of Detroit not permit themselves to be diverted by the few who resort to abuse . . . to solve problems [and] . . . sow the seeds of hate and prejudice at the expense of the total community.”85 But while the mayor thwarted Beck’s offensive, he did not quell conservative whites’ seething criticism of his police and welfare policies.

Overall, Cavanagh chose largely to ignore critical whites.86 The mayor was far more concerned with the escalating discontent of those poor and working-class black Detroiters whose votes had cemented his electoral win. Therefore, between 1965 and 1967, he decided to step up his efforts to implement the Great Society and, most pressingly, to reform the DPD. Cavanagh was determined to address the troubling fact that, although the city had received its “first application for a complaint alleging denial of equal protection of the laws because of race” in February 1964,87 between 1964 and 1966, it had received an additional 174 complaints against law enforcement agencies specifically.88 But when the mayor decided to accelerate his reform efforts, he never adequately analyzed why his administration’s previous efforts had failed.

The Cavanagh administration initially had addressed the police problem by calling for equal employment opportunities within the force, by ordering greater training and discipline for its officers, and by increasing the communication both within the DPD and between the DPD and the community.89 On September 16, 1964, for example, the CCR had written to Commissioner Girardin to strongly suggest he invite “representatives of such groups as the NAACP . . . to participate in regularly scheduled meetings with the Commission and the DPD.”90 Girardin agreed to do this and also agreed to “investigate all citizen complaints alleging: misconduct, mistreatment or discrimination by any police officer, police departmental actions resulting in the denial of civil rights or civil liberties” through the Citizen Complaint Bureau (CCB).91 These proposed meetings between the CCR, the DPD, and the NAACP were well under way by December 1964, and correspondence regarding the various issues on the table that year went to all of these parties.92 The CCB was also very busy. According to the police department, “As of November 22, 1965 the Bureau has received 89 complaints.”93

But these early reform efforts had failed largely because the Cavanagh administration accepted the premise that the DPD should play a role in its own reform, rather than be subjected to a civilian review board. As letters from Commissioner Girardin to the Reverend James Wadsworth of the NAACP make clear, the meetings on citizen grievances had accomplished virtually nothing. Regarding black Detroiters Leonard Joseph, Eugene Tyson, Ruth Rembert, and Donna Tyson, Girardin wrote, “your complainants’ allegations that they were discriminated against because of their race is not sustained by this investigation.”94 Regarding complainant Eugene Dowdell, Girardin concluded, “the allegation based upon race is not sustained by our investigation.”95 And for Leo Smith and Leroy Smith, “Investigation of the ... case ... [also] failed to produce sufficient evidence to sustain any action regarding racial overtones.”96 Clearly, Commissioner Girardin did not believe that his officers discriminated against black Detroiters, and he assured Wadsworth, “you know you and the other officers of the NAACP have my very best wishes for success in the coming years.”97 But the NAACP was no more encouraged by Girardin’s sentiments than was the black community at large. Of the 89 complaints filed with the CCB, only 52 were investigated as of November 22, 1965, and of those, “38 complaints were not sustained.”98

Even when the mayor escalated police reform efforts after 1965, little progress was made because, once again, the police retained too much control over the reform process. In 1966, Cavanagh called on the MCRC to intercede with the DPD to improve police procedure. In a seemingly cooperative gesture, that April, Commissioner Girardin signed a document with Burton Gordin, executive director of the MCRC, which included a fourteen-point “memorandum of agreement between the Michigan Civil Rights Commission and the DPD on the procedural steps in the investigations of civil rights complaints.” Almost immediately, however, there was a “breakdown of the Girardin-Gordin agreement” because the DPD would not produce documents (such as officer arrest notes) in good faith.99

Despite the continuing dismal results of police reform efforts, well into 1967 citizens nevertheless filed official complaints against the police, naively hoping the more evidence of police abuse that civic leaders had before them, the more aggressively they would act against renegade members of law enforcement. Where there had been 105 citizen complaints filed against the DPD in 1965, for example, in 1967 there were 278.100 And as the black middle class well knew, this dramatic escalation of citizen complaints was a very ominous sign. Without significant and immediate reform, these middle-class leaders feared that real trouble was on the horizon.

By 1967, black leaders began trying desperately to let the white liberal leadership know just how serious city blacks’ frustration was. As Dr. Albert Wheeler, president of the Michigan Conference of NAACP Branches, put it bluntly when he spoke before the MCRC’s Conference for Municipal Officials on January 16, 1967, “part of my mixed emotions here today is hopelessness and frustration—we have spent endless hours in meetings and negotiations only to reap ineffective token remedies. Even reasonable, honest, long-suffering Negroes like me are beginning to lose patience and hope in meetings such as this.”101 But while black leaders willingly expressed their dismay with the Cavanagh administration’s inability to effect real change, they nevertheless stuck by their white liberal friends and did not consider joining forces with discontented blacks to demand more aggressive action.102 Indeed, the increasingly anti-liberal grassroots discontent surfacing around them greatly alarmed the black middle class and it warned white civic leaders of the serious threat that they both faced if substantive change did not soon occur. Again, as Wheeler put it, there is a “large mass of human beings [which] has been on the side lines hoping against hope that NAACP, the Urban League, CORE, ACLU, and Federal, State, and Local Civil Rights Commissions were going to open new doors for training, for opportunity, for family life, and for human dignity. But day-by-day and year-by-year, defeats which these groups experience only add to the bitterness of the human beings in the ghetto and drives younger people into the camps of the militants and the black nationalists.”103

Although black nationalism was not a significant political force in Detroit until the late 1960s, middle-class blacks clearly considered it a potential problem. They had taken notice when Malcolm X helped to organize the Northern Grassroots Conference at Mr. Kelley’s Lounge and Recreation Center in Detroit in 1963. Even though there were only about 700 people in attendance, liberal observers were alarmed that this group represented eleven states. Even more unsettling was the fact that Malcolm X’s highly inflammatory “Message to the Grass Roots” speech at this gathering had been recorded so that every disillusioned Detroiter would have the opportunity to consider its message.104 As Dr. Wheeler noted with trepidation, “This is a relatively small group whose future and destiny depend upon whether you as public officials continue to bury your heads in the sands of unreality or whether you face the racial issue honestly and courageously.”105

Thanks to the numerous warnings of the black middle class, by 1967, Detroit’s white liberal leaders were certainly aware that “even though there has been improvement, mutual distrust, suspicion and hostility continues to exist between police officers and members of the Negro community.”106 And just as important, they recognized that “the ‘alienated cores’ of a Negro poor are potential powder kegs in Detroit (as elsewhere) and a systematic effort is being made to ignite, exploit and direct a chain explosion within them. The effort is being made by black nationalists, Maoists, terrorist, and other minuscule groups.”107 But white liberal leaders still focused primarily on the fact that the all-powerful NAACP stood by them and thus believed that they could still shape the city as planned. Indeed, while some black leaders had become openly critical of Cavanagh, it is significant that the city’s biggest civil rights organization dutifully supported him. On January 25, 1965, when black representatives from Northern High School, the Cotillion Club, and the Urban League met at black attorney George Crockett’s office to write a letter to the mayor saying that he had not fulfilled his commitments to the black community,108 the NAACP did not send a representative and later refused to sign the letter.109

The fact that black leaders such as Crockett were willing to censure the Cavanagh administration undoubtedly heartened many in the black community. Others, however, were outraged by the willingness of black middle-class liberals to stick by white political allies even after their complaints and warnings went unheeded. These citizens knew well that black leaders had been expressing their discontent and had been warning the city’s white administration with no satisfaction for years. In 1961, for example, Whitney Young, director of the National Urban League, had spoken publicly on black leaders’ dismay that “the continuing segregation in schools and other places of public service and accommodation . . . stifles the community and perpetuates suspicion, fears and hatreds all which serve to keep the Negro citizen out of the mainstream life.”110 Then, in the spring of 1965, the executive director of the Detroit Urban League, Francis Kornegay, had written to Cavanagh suggesting that, together, they set up a “broad and representative forum [before the summer] to . . . help reduce the possibilities of racial conflict, tension, and incidents which could transpose us from the asset side to the liability side of the human ledger.”111 Because so little had changed since 1961, or even after 1964, however, in the summer of 1967, a segment of Detroit finally did what civic leaders had feared most—it set city neighborhoods ablaze. In doing so, these Detroiters fully shattered the 1961 dream that the Motor City soon would be economically secure, socially peaceful, and politically stable.

In the wee hours of July 23,1967, Detroit police officers engaged in a routine raid on a “blind pig” in the city where a party was taking place to celebrate the return of a black veteran from Vietnam. But when these officers arrested 82 people, they touched a nerve in the black community. In the one hour that it took to make its arrests, the DPD attracted the attention of more than 200 local residents. According to an eyewitness, “Negroes coming out Sunday morning were first dismayed by the presence of the police. As onlookers grew, the police increased their force. Dismay turned to anger at the show of force.”112 By 8:25 that morning, the crowd assembled had grown noticeably agitated and unruly. Specifically, the residents of this poor neighborhood began throwing bottles into the windows of police cars and setting fires. By 8:30 a.m., Michigan’s governor, George Romney, felt it necessary to fly over the area in a helicopter. By the time Romney was circling above, police in full riot gear had blocked off one square mile of the city, and, at that point, “several Negroes in a green paneled truck drove through the area minutes later with sound equipment repeating This is Black Power. Fight for your rights!’”113 Romney and Cavanagh then decided to call in 9,200 National Guardsmen and 800 State Police officers.

By 2:15 a.m. on July 24,1967, Cavanagh and Romney agreed to call in federal help, and by 9 a.m., President Johnson sent in 4,700 paratroopers from the 3d Brigade 82d Airborne Division and the 2d Brigade 101^st Airborne Division which had recently returned from Vietnam. As members of the military attempted to restore order, the violence taking place around them was staggering. During this melee, the age-old hostilities between black urbanites and the DPD boiled over in shocking ways. Rumors flew through city streets that black Detroiters in the riot zone were taking every opportunity to attack police cars and to snipe at officers from behind windows. Before confirming the truth of these rumors, local police officers unleashed their fury on city blacks.114 Journalists from the Washington Post reported two such incidents of extraordinary police violence. In one case, a black man came into the emergency room of a Detroit hospital with his hands cuffed behind his back and his face was covered in blood. As journalists wrote, “‘Somebody help me, somebody help me,’ the Negro pleaded. A blue helmeted policeman stepped up to the handcuffed prisoner and kicked him in the groin. ‘You should have thought of that before you started this, Nigger’ the policeman said.”115 In another case, a drunken black man whom the police recently had arrested was shouting curses from the back of a squad car when As a result of such extreme violence, when the military finally was able to restore order in the Motor City, thirty-three black and ten white Detroiters were dead.117

a short, thick-necked white city policeman in a riot helmet yelled back at the drunk to “Shut Up.” Apparently the prisoner made some obscene reference to the policeman’s ancestry. “You can’t call my mother that you Black bastard. I won’t kill you in front of the newspaper reporters”—the latter remark with an angry glance in our direction—“But I’ll shut your mouth.” With that he thrust the butt of his rifle into the car and smashed the handcuffed prisoner in the face again and again and again. The prisoner collapsed and rolled onto the floor of the car.116

The magnitude of destruction and violence in Detroit’s July insurrection shocked not only the Motor City but the whole of America. Although there had been other urban uprisings in recent years, most notably in Watts and in Newark, it was Detroit’s upheaval that caused President Johnson to appoint a special commission to determine why such conflict was erupting at the very height of his ambitious plans to improve life for America’s poor. Johnson suspected that black nationalist troublemakers were sparking the nation’s urban uprisings. However the experts that Johnson had appointed to the Kerner Commission, to determine the cause of the nations rash of urban uprisings after 1964, disagreed. According to the commission, urban uprisings were in fact the expression of pent-up (and largely legitimate) frustration with the persistence of de facto segregation, the ever-present reality of racial discrimination, and the overwhelming evidence of police brutality in African American areas of the nation’s cities.

Because 1967 witnessed a total of 164 eruptions in 128 cities across the United States, much recent scholarship has suggested that it was precisely this sort of urban upheaval that sounded the death knell for America’s inner cities. But this perspective ignores the fact that, just as the catastrophic Great Depression generated new political options for how America might be ordered, the polarizing urban rebellions of the 1960s generated new political possibilities for America’s inner cities. In this case, racial inequalities and tensions, not economics alone, would lead to a new moment of extraordinary political uncertainty as the 1960s ended and the 1970s began.