Civil Rights Events

Detroit Riots, 1967

Racial Hatred

The Detroit Race Riot in Detroit, Michigan in the summer of 1967 was one of the most violent urban revolts in the 20th century. It came as an immediate response to police brutality but underlying conditions including segregated housing and schools and rising black unemployment helped drive the anger of the rioters (Wang 1).

.. the police force was not in line with the demographic makeup of the city. The police force was 95% white, while the city was 40% black. There were approximately 5,500 cops on the police force and only 100 were black.

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… just hours before the Algiers [Motel] incident, Detroit police officer Jerome Olshove was shot and killed by a looter. A few days earlier, Newark police detective Frederick Toto was killed by a sniper. The police force was on edge. It was made worse by the fact that, over the course of the riots, 2,498 rifles and 38 handguns had been looted from local stores (Detroit 4, 6).

On Sunday evening, July 23, the Detroit Police Vice Squad officers raided an after hours “blind pig,” an unlicensed bar on the corner of 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue in the center of the city’s oldest and poorest black neighborhood. A party at the bar was in progress to celebrate the return of two black servicemen from Vietnam. Although officers had expected a few patrons would be inside they found and arrested all 82 people attending the party. As they were being transported from the scene by police, a crowd of about 200 people gathered outside agitated by rumors that police used excessive force during the 12th Street bar raid. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., an empty bottle was thrown into the rear window of a police car, and then a waste basket was thrown through a storefront window (Wang 1).

It was about 3:45 a.m. July 23, 1967. William Scott, known as Bill, was among a crowd of mostly young African Americans gathering to watch the police hustle club patrons into waiting paddy wagons. He had a particular interest in two of the people being led away.

His father, William Walter Scott II, was the principal owner of the club, an illegal after-hours drinking and gambling joint. His older sister, Wilma, was a cook and waitress. The night was hot and sticky, and the crowd’s initial teasing of the arrestees devolved into raucous goading of police as they became more aggressive, pushing and twisting the arms of the women.

“You don’t have to treat them that way,” Bill Scott yelled. “They can walk. Let them walk, you white sons of bitches.”

By the time the wagons were full, the crowd had swelled, the taunts had grown more hostile and, though police manpower was thin early Sunday, several scout cars responded to the scene. Cops stood at the ready in the middle of 12th Street, billy clubs in hand, forcing the throng back on the sidewalk.

Scott, tall and lean, mounted a car and began to preach to a crowd long accustomed to the harsh tactics of the overwhelmingly white Detroit police in black neighborhoods: “Are we going to let these peckerwood motherf—— come down here any time they want and mess us around?”

“Hell, no!” people yelled back.

Scott walked into an alley and grabbed a bottle, seeking “the pleasure of hitting one in the head, maybe killing him,” he remembers thinking. Making his way into the middle of the crowd for cover, he threw the bottle at a sergeant standing in front of the door.

The missile missed, shattering on the sidewalk. A phalanx of police moved toward the crowd, then backed off. As the paddy wagons drove away, bottles, bricks and sticks flew through the air, smashing the windows of departing police cars. Bill Scott said he felt liberated.

“For the first time in our lives we felt free. Most important, we were right in what we did to the law.”

The rebellion was underway (McGraw 1-2).

At 5:20 a.m. additional police officers were sent to 12th Street to stop the growing violence. By mid-morning looting and window-smashing spread out along 12th Street. As the violence escalated into the afternoon, Detroit Congressman John Conyers climbed atop a car in the middle of 12th Street to address the crowd. As he was speaking, the police informed him that they could not guarantee his safety as he was pelted with bricks and bottles (Wang 2).

After Scott whipped up the crowd, threw the bottle and watched the last paddy wagon drive away, he said he entered the club to find the interior in shambles. The jukebox and wine bottles were broken; even the typewriter he used for his writing had been smashed.

He said he returned to the street and threw a litter basket through the window of a drug store, triggering an alarm and jacking up the adrenalized atmosphere on 12th Street. “I had to destroy something,” he writes.

People slowly entered the drugstore. “I wasn’t even thinking about looting at the time it all started,” Scott writes. “My interest was to strike out at something that was more powerful and more legitimate than me; at the time this was the white store owners.”

He joined others in breaking windows, and mounted a box to play traffic cop, directing drivers along the increasingly unruly street. There were no real police in sight. At one point, a “young diddy-bopper” stopped him on the street and said, “I am so glad you started this thing.”

Scott says he was staggered by the comment, as his actions began to sink in. He felt sick to his stomach, but soon recovered, believing that whatever the motivation of the looters, they shared a lack of respect for the law, “the law that had abused them and their right to live,” he writes (McGraw 15-16).

Around 1:00 p.m. police officers began to report injuries from stones, bottles, and other objects that were thrown at them. When firemen responded to fire alarms, they too were struck with thrown objects. Mayor Jerome Cavanaugh met with city and state leaders at police headquarters and agreed that additional force was needed in order to stop the violence. By 3:00 p.m. 360 police officers began to assemble at the Detroit Armory as the rioting spread from 12th Street to other areas of the city. The fires started during the riot spread rapidly in the afternoon heat and as 25 mile per hour winds began to blow. Even as businesses and homes went up in flames, firemen were increasingly subject to attack by the rioters.

At 5:30 p.m., twelve hours into the riot, Mayor Cavanaugh requested that the National Guard be brought into Detroit to stop the violence. Meanwhile firefighters abandoned an area roughly 100 square blocks in size around 12th Street as the fires raged out of control. The first troops arrived in the city at 7:00 p.m. and 45 minutes later the Mayor instituted a curfew between 9:00 p.m and 5:00 a.m. Seven minutes into the curfew a 16-year-old African American boy was the first gunshot victim (Wang 2).

The origins of the Scott family’s story is a familiar one in Detroit.

William Walter Scott II, the owner of the blind pig and Bill Scott’s father, was born in Georgia and came to Detroit as a child, just as the “Great Migration” of African Americans from the South to a fresh start in northern cities began before World War I. The influx would boost Detroit’s black population seven-fold within a decade as the auto industry transformed the city into an industrial metropolis starving for workers.

When Bill Scott, his sister Wilma and their siblings – Tyrone, Reginald and Charlotte — were young, their father made a good living at Dodge Main and other factories. But between 1947 and 1963 the city’s manufacturing economy hemorrhaged 134,000 jobs, triggering the start of Detroit’s long decline. William Scott lost his factory job, and subsequently the family lost its house.

Unable to find work, William Scott II turned to “the numbers,” the illegal, lottery-like gambling game ubiquitous in black neighborhoods, even as his political activism grew.

He eventually became involved in organizing black political power by training volunteers for local campaigns. His second-floor suite of rooms on 12th Street was officially known as the United Community League for Civic Action. On the night of the 1967 raid, one room contained a wall chart of local precinct delegates. William Scott’s wife, Hazel, worked in the Detroit office of G. Mennen (Soapy) Williams, Michigan’s Democratic governor from 1949 to 1961, who was popular in the black community.

But the elder Scott’s disgust with Detroit’s white political system grew. Years later, he would tell a sociologist studying the riot that political leaders pass legislation “just to control and contain the Negro.”

Mr. Scott did not hide his militancy, or his anger. He fumed at being called “boy” by police and roughly frisked for no apparent reason. In 1973, when Coleman Young was elected Detroit’s first black mayor on a police-reform platform, he told his daughter Wilma, “I can finally get off my knees.”

“All the people have had their revolutions, and we’re the last. It’s something that’s got to come, you can’t stop it. When people get sick and oppressed, they’re gonna riot,” William Scott told the sociologist.

“My father was a survivor,” said Wilma Scott, now 70, who spent more than 40 years as an office worker at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital. “And he was a survivor without being a criminal. Except for the numbers, which he did not feel was a crime, okay?

“To this day, I understand his logic. He was a black man that was determined just to be free. It’s as simple as that. To say he had to depend on a white man for his living – he did not like that. Especially after being in the factory and being laid off” (MGraw 4-6).

At 11:00 p.m. a 45-year-old white man was seen looting a store and was shot by the store owner. Before dawn, four other store looters were shot, one while struggling with the police. As the night wore on, there were reports of deaths by snipers and complaints of sniper fire. Many of these reports were from policemen who were unable to determine the origins of the gunfire.

At 2:00 a.m. Monday morning, 800 State Police Officers and 8,000 National Guardsmen were ordered to the city by Michigan Governor George Romney. They were later augmented by 4,700 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division ordered in by President Lyndon Johnson. With their arrival the looting and arson began to end but there were continuous reports of sniper fire. The sniper attacks stopped only with the end of the violence on Thursday, July 27th. The Mayor lifted the curfew on Tuesday, August 1 and the National Guardsmen left the city (Wang 3).

Bill Scott was born two years after Wilma, in 1948. In his memoir, he describes a bleak childhood of constant moves, being bullied at school and spending lonely days wandering through alleys, looking for useable junk.

He was close to his mother, but she was often hospitalized with heart problems and died when Bill was 14. He said he feared his father, writing that he beat him, though Wilma Scott says she did not witness such violence.

Bill Scott did not see his own early promise. He had trouble learning in school, and thought himself “ugly,” “dull,” “strange,” “useless,” even “mentally retarded.” By age 10, he was unruly and suffering emotional problems. He was sent to the Hawthorn Center, a state-run facility for emotionally-troubled children in Northville, and later to a similar institution, the Boys Republic in Farmington Hills. In his own mind, he wrote, he pretended to be white because, he felt, being black was bad, but white children were considered good.

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Bill Scott received counseling at the two youth homes and met adults who mentored him. He writes glowingly of both places, and they seemed to help him stabilize.

As he moved into middle school, the unruly boy began to blossom. Scott writes of becoming intellectually curious and aware of the importance of good values: respecting women and elders; obeying the law; refraining from stealing or premarital sex. He began attending church. “I liked the sound of this heaven place,” he wrote.

After a brief, tumultuous stay in a foster home, Scott returned to his father’s temporary home, a three-room apartment near 12th Street .It was in this rapidly changing neighborhood that Bill Scott said he bumped into the reality of being a black man in Detroit. After years in white-run institutions and attending church, his values were “almost in exact opposition to the way my people lived” back on 12th Street.

Because of his polite bearing, he was mocked by neighborhood toughs, who called him “Proper” and “Whitey.” He said he stood out because he was a “decent” person. “I didn’t have processed hair, a rag hanging from my head or dirty clothes,” he writes, “and, most of all, I had the ‘proper thoughts.’”

At Northern High, Scott noted that virtually all the students were black and most of the faculty was white, a recipe for failure, he believed.

He called Northern “a nigger factory” that churned out unschooled students who wanted to learn but were at the mercy of teachers who either didn’t want to teach black students, or didn’t know how.

Test scores showed 9th graders at Northern reading at a sixth-grade level. But Scott was smart and ambitious and determined to attend college, even as his white counselor tried to steer him to vocational courses. At one point, he tried to transfer to a more competitive majority-white city school, but was refused. So he made the best of it, playing drums in the band, lettering in football, learning to pole vault and, in 1966, graduating (McGraw 7-8).

As he moved through his teens, Scott began to face another fact of life for many young black men in the 1960s: the Detroit police.

Scott wrote that he tried to live like a “civilized Negro,” staying active in a middle-class black church. But as he left a church meeting one day when he was 17, cops stopped him for jaywalking across 12th Street. When Scott asked what he had done, he said one of the officers threw him against the scout car and called him “boy.” They gave him a $10 ticket. Scott wrote that he ripped it up in front of them and threw in a trash can next to their car.

Next was a run-in with the department’s notorious Big Four — three plainclothes cops with a uniformed driver in a big car — a unit that cruised precincts and routinely harassed blacks. Walking out of a store, Scott and brothers Tyrone and Reggie were stopped and frisked for no reason, Scott writes. The confrontation ended with Scott shouting, “You can kiss my black ass.” He said police backed off when an angry crowd began to form.

Scott’s racial consciousness continued to grow during a months-long job search in the spring and early summer of 1967 when, despite an uptick in the city’s economy, 25 to 30 percent of black youths between 18 and 24 remained unemployed. Failing to find work, he was forced to drop out of Michigan Lutheran College, a Detroit school he attended before U-M.

The frustrations piled up, along with a growing perception that his fellow church members attended services to “wallow in their own self-hatred” and ask God’s forgiveness “for being black.” He felt like he was pulling himself up by his bootstraps – as society demanded – but getting nowhere.

It was these accumulated grievances, hardly unique to Bill Scott or to blacks in Detroit, that reached a boiling point in the summer of 1967, when dozens of U.S. cities exploded in violence. At age 19, the Bill Scott who threw the first bottle at police was a young man determined to break with his past. “I decided to reject anything that was white,” he writes.

It also softened how he viewed his father.

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“I could now understand why my father had given up in the white conventional world. I was black and being black meant I had to live black…no more hating myself because I was black” (McGraw 9-11).

“They are savages,” a Detroit Free Press reporter overheard one police officer say. “Those black son-of-a bitches. I’m going to get me a couple of them before this is over.”

Forty-three people died that week. Detroit Police shot and killed 18. National Guardsmen were involved in the deaths of another 11 people, including a 4-year-old girl named Tanya Blanding whose tiny body was riddled with bullets when Guardsmen aimed a .50 caliber machine gun at her apartment building and opened fire because they mistook her uncle lighting a cigarette near a window for the flash of a sniper’s gunshot.

Guardsmen dispensed an estimated 155,000 rounds of ammunition in five days. They even fired at the police. For example, when police officers shot out the city’s streetlights to avoid detection, Guardsmen stationed a block away heard the gunshots and the glass shattering and believed it was from a sniper. When the Guard returned fire, police officers then reported being under attack by snipers (McGuire 4-5).

In the five days and nights of violence 33 blacks and 10 whites were killed, 1,189 were injured and over 7,200 people were arrested. Approximately 2,500 stores were looted and the total property damage was estimated at about $32 million. Until the riots following the death of Dr. Martin Luther King in April 1968, the Detroit Race Riot stood as the largest urban uprising of the 1960s (Wang 3).

Scott awoke Sunday afternoon to find smoke in the house, which was on a nearby residential section of 12th Street. A neighboring home was on fire, and his father figured the flames would spread before the fire department could arrive. Firefighters showed up, though, and extinguished the blaze, but it rekindled, destroying their house and most of their block.

12th Street was a chaotic scene, with sirens, fires and stunned people running back and forth, fearing for their lives. Scott went to stay with a friend.

The next morning, with widespread confusion across the city, Scott looked for a newspaper. He walked more than a mile, to the usually busy corner of Grand River and West Grand Boulevard, but the streets were deserted, with buildings burned and looted. He watched as two young men climbed through the broken window of a drugstore when suddenly a line of squad cars drove up. Scott told the police he was only watching, but they cuffed him and took him downtown.

Charged with illegally entering the store, Scott spent the next 15 days in a gulag of crowded, sweltering, stinking lockups, from the oily confines of precinct garages to stifling buses with shut windows in the July sun to the Belle Isle bath house, as Detroit Police sought innovative ways to store thousands of arrestees. He was finally released after charges were dropped.

Taking the bus back to 12th Street, Scott got off at Seward and walked past the hollowed-out neighborhood of loose bricks, broken glass and boarded-up buildings.

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“The further I walked down Twelfth, the more I became aware of the destruction around me, which made me feel less of a man for being part of it,” he writes.

“A man doesn’t destroy his home; he protects it at all cost. This I hadn’t done; I let another man come and force me to destroy my own. This put me at his mercy. I became a boy once more. He could control me completely.”

Bill Scott spoke to his father, who was laying low, fearing retaliation from police for what had happened outside his club. Bill returned to the factory where he had found work, but was fired for missing two weeks with no explanation. His car had been towed, and he couldn’t afford to get it back. He was filled with hatred, he wrote. The thought of killing police constantly crossed his mind.

A month later, Bill Scott paid the $1.80 Greyhound bus fare and moved to Ann Arbor, “never to return,” he wrote, “until” (McGraw 17-19)?

Works cited:

“Detroit Movie vs. the True Story of the Algiers Motel Killings.” History Hollywood. Web. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/detroit/

McGraw, Bill. “He Helped Start 1967 Detroit Riot, Now His Son Struggles with the Legacy.” Detroit Free Press. December 29, 2016. Web. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016/12/29/detroit-riot-william-scott-race/95675688/

McGuire, Danielle. “Detroit Police Killed Their Sons at the Algiers Motel. No One Ever Said Sorry.” Bridge. July 25, 2017. Web. https://www.bridgemi.com/detroit-journalism-cooperative/detroit-police-killed-their-sons-algiers-motel-no-one-ever-said-sorry

Wang, Tabitha. “Detroit Race Riot (1967).” BLACKPAST. July 3, 2008. Web. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/detroit-race-riot-1967/