As night fell over Detroit on July 22, 1967, a crowd gathered to welcome two young servicemen home from Vietnam. Cheers escaped from the illegal after-hours saloon with each roll of the dice. By 3 a.m., when a handful of white cops busted into the all-black establishment to shut it down, about 85 mostly exhausted, mostly hot and mostly drunk revelers remained.
Raids like this were common in Detroit, expected even, but the crowd’s reaction that night was anything but usual. By 4 a.m., 200 people had gathered outside the saloon to watch the arrests. Tempers rose. Onlookers began hurling rocks and beer bottles at the police. Windows shattered, fights erupted and tensions escalated.
By the end of day, smoke blanketed the city’s landscape-after snipers gunned down firefighters, the remaining companies refused to work. The next day, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent 2,700 paratroopers into the city, raising the number of law enforcers to 7,230. It still took them three more days to end the violence.
Over the course of five days, 43 men and women had been killed, 7,231 people had been arrested, 2,509 buildings had been destroyed, $36 million in insured property had been lost-and Detroit had changed forever.
Other students take off their junior year of college to study abroad-master a new language, taste unfamiliar cuisine, make foreign friends. But two years away from home has taught me that the culture I’m most unfamiliar with is my own. So I’m leaving Georgetown next month to spend a semester in Michigan. While Detroit is no Paris, I am anxious to uncover how the hidden history of my town has shaped me into the person I am today.
Detroit once stood as the “model Midwestern boomtown.” During the 1950s and 1960s, the city’s population exploded, cars were churning out of the plants at record rates and the smooth sounds of Motown drifted across the airwaves. Urban planners and builders, instead of packing Detroit’s lower classes into downtown tenements, constructed miles and miles of one-story homes radiating from the city’s industrial core. Detroiters could work in the grime of the city and live on the oak-lined streets of suburbia.
But something was going wrong. After years of bearing the brunt of institutionalized discriminatory practices, Detroit’s black lower class had had enough. Ever since waves of southern blacks migrated to Detroit to supply industry with sorely needed labor, racial tension had been mounting. Even years after the abolition of Jim Crow, racist practices remained ingrained within the institutions of Detroit. Then came the 1967 rebellion.
Detroit today is as divided as it was forty years ago. We live in segregated communities and attend segregated schools. We shop in different malls and watch movies in separate theaters. We each have our own radio stations, clubs, and restaurants. There are no riots today, though, because we all seem to complacently understand that racism isn’t ever going to go away.
I grew up only fifteen miles outside of Detroit in America’s third-richest county. I never learned about the housing segregation, the racist police department or the discriminatory employment practices that plagued the city. Even though it occurred only blocks away from the homes my parents grew up in, I never learned about the second largest violent rebellion to take place on American soil since the Civil War.
In school we learned how racism tore apart other communities, other places. But racism is a part of my hometown’s history, whether we talk about it or not. I grew up in a violent place, even though I was shielded from it.
I could spend the next few months somewhere warmer, somewhere more exciting, somewhere less like home. But how could I call someplace abroad home for a few months when my real home is foreign to me? It’s time I cross the city limit.
Rob Anderson is a junior in the college and an associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. He got the fax and asks that you respond less violently. He doesn’t sponsor genocide.
