1967 Detroit Riot

In the early morning hours of July 23rd, 1967 violence erupted in Detroit, Michigan after police raided an illegal bar in the middle of the night. “Blind pigs,” as they were called in local Detroit, were a feature in both Negro and White communities and served as the only form of afterhours entertainment for factory workers, who worked the swing shift. Police raids on similar establishments were common and police normally would find around two dozen patrons at an establishment per raid. However, on the night of July 22nd the fifth and final raid of the night was to be conducted at the United Community and Civic League on the corners of 12th Street and Clairmount. During the time of this police raid a party was being held, for two war heroes

returning from service, at this “blind pig” venue and police were caught off guard by the sheer number of patrons within the establishment. The United Community and Civic League had been raided twice before with only ten to twenty-eight people being arrested per raid however, this time there were eighty-two patrons that would need to be transported and booked back at the local tenth precinct.
A crowd quickly grew on 12th street as the patrons were taken back to the police precinct.

Around five in the morning an empty bottled crashed into the window of a police car and trash cans started going thru store windows. The pre-dawn chaos rapidly escalated into a destructive rebellion that engulfed the city of Detroit, Michigan. Governor Romney deployed the Michigan National Guard and President Johnson sent in federal troops to aid in bringing peace back to Detroit. For five days, chaos and fire consumed the city leaving forty-three people dead, millions of dollars of damage, and the use of over seventeen thousand law enforcement, guardsmen, and troops to restore order to the streets. The 1967 Detroit Riot is known as one of the bloodiest civil unrests in the United States. Many of the deaths in these five days were of young African-Americans and many of them were killed by law

enforcement.
Many works have been done studying the riot and looking at various aspects of the how and why the riot occurred; including the media’s involvement. Philip Meyer’s article “A Newspaper’s Role Between the Riots,” is a comprehensive look at the way newspapers failed to bring attention to the racial problems that existed in the ghettos and how those failures were partly to blame for racial riots. Meyer’s argues that newspapers had two problems that needed to be addressed to move away from the passive racism that kept them from covering the important day to day racial disturbances and ghetto issues that were causing Negros to riot to begin with. The author states that newspapers must make local governments pay attention to the problems of the ghetto and that papers themselves need to restructure their news strategies so that they are giving the attention these racial issues deserve. Meyer’s uses The Detroit 1967 riots and the Detroit Free Press as a case study to show how newspapers should use a systematic approach to reporting on racial riots. The Free Press in the weeks following the 1967 riot used a social science based survey to investigate further the underlying attitudes of blacks living in the riot areas. With the help of scholars from the University of Michigan they uncovered and corrected misconceptions about who was rioting and why. Meyer’s believes this is the job of newspapers and this type of getting into the issues and finding the social problems needs to be a routine practice that occurs before the problems get so bad that there is rioting. This article is important because Meyer’s sheds light to the racist structure in the press that left Negro issues out as they were deemed unimportant and provides a workable solution to how newspaper should be covering social issues to help avoid riots and other violence by simply bringing issue to the forefront for discussion.
Another article that provides some historiography is “What the black press said last summer,” the author, Bernard Roscho, looks at how the black press covered the Detroit Riot of 1967 and in generally, any racial discontent compared to how other major daily prints covered the same events. The author argues that black press put on record things that were covered in little detail or not covered at all and could provide a Negro perspective to the racial crisis that other daily papers did not. Roscho, looks at the way the Negro press covered the Detroit Riot and used the New York Amsterdam as an example of the fact that most of the Negro papers, which were either weekly or bi weekly did not provide much coverage of the actual news of the riot however, more importantly were the comments provided, from letters to the editor. The author used many examples of ordinary negro citizen’s letters that were printed in the black press as an attempt to get the rioters message of discontent for the double standard because of race that was a way of life in United States. One main point that Roscho gets across is that the negro message was failing to be heard or covered in the predominantly white daily press. Another point that the author relays in this article is that the black press really spent the summer of 1967 trying to cool the racial tensions and keep riots from burning down the cities. The significance of this article especially in terms of historiography is that it provides a perspective and look at the way black press was covering racial tensions and the message that they were trying to give to their readers. This is significant because it shows African-American attitudes towards the racial conflicts and gives a way to try to understand black communities and perspective in a predominately white press.
These articles both looked at newspaper and how they covered the riot of 1967. Both articles believed that there was a serious failure on the part of most newspapers to bring the real social discontent to the forefront for discussion. The purpose of this paper is to compare the newspaper coverage of the Detroit civil unrest in 1967 to look for any variations in coverage. The four newspapers that will be analyzed for their coverage of the unrest are The Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Battle Enquirer, and The Detroit Free Press. The newspapers evaluated, immediately portrayed the Detroit riot as a race riot and that perspective was kept by the papers after the riot was finished while the Detroit Free Press began to question the legitimacy of that classification due to the lack of targeting between races and participation by members of white and black races.
The first newspaper that was analyzed for their coverage of the 1967 Detroit civil unrest was a national paper, the Chicago Tribune.

The Tribune is the fifth largest newspaper in circulation and tends to lean towards conservative values. The articles that were examined were all written between the dates July 26th, 1967 to August 23rd, 1967. In the days of the riot and directly after the Tribune articles that were examined never labeled the riot as a racial riot or as a Negro riot. In an article from July 29th, writer Aldo Beckman writes that Americans should be careful not to place blame on the Negro race when it was a small number of Negros who committed the criminal acts of looting, rioting, and arson which brought the city of Detroit to destruction during the unrest. Another article from July 29th quoted Police Supt. James B. Conlisk as saying that the Detroit riot was “criminal activity and I can’t see how it’s related to civil right.” In another article from July 31st, the writer discusses how congress was calling for “strict, sharp enforcement of the laws to curb racial violence,” but never says that the Detroit disturbance was part of that racial violence. After the riot was over most of the articles that came out of the Tribune centered around congress testimonies and trials of people who committed crimes during the riot. One thing that stood out about the coverage from the Tribune was that there was little to no mention of any white participation in the rioting

or looting. Also, there was little mention if the riot was not a race riot based on civil right then what was it. The reporting did not include any explanations of social discontent that could have been a contributing factor the discourse.
The second newspaper that was examined for this paper was the New York Times.
Of the four newspaper that were evaluated it was found that in the beginning days of the riot most of the newspapers were quick to deem the riot as race riot. Many articles within the papers used labeling terms such as; Negro riot, Negro youth, and race riot to describe people and events that took place. The Detroit Free Press’s coverage despite winning the Pulitzer Prize was very back and forth.
This research is important because it shows how different papers around the nation covered and portrayed the 1967 Detroit Riot. Whether the riot was a race riot or a social rebellion is a highly-debated topic. The riot was mostly reported as a race or Negro riot and even the Detroit Free Press who won a Pulitzer Prize for their riot coverage initial framed the unrest as a racial crisis. My research shows the importance of how a newspaper’s framing of their coverage can shape the perspective their reader gains on an event. Detroit is known as a race riot even though it was not a black vs. white riot. Both races rioted, looted, and burnt both black and white businesses to the ground together.