riots of detroit

RIOTS OF DETROIT

JULY 1967

• The blind pig above this print shop at 9125 12th Street between Clairmount and Atkinson streets became the flashpoint for the chaos. Police raided the club at 3:40 a.m. Sunday, July 23. As the last arrestees were loaded into police cars, a bottle crashed through a squad car window. What had been Saturday night revelry quickly turned into a crowd of about 200 shouting angry cries against "the man" and "whitey."

• Police watch as chaos spills into the intersection of 12th and Clairmount in Detroit following a predawn police raid on a blind pig -- an illegal drinking establishment. It is Sunday, July 23, 1967. When the violence ended five days later, 43 people had died. The racial unrest became known as the nation's worst.

• Smoke fills the air over the ruckus on 12th Street. The police department's first strategy was to barricade the street. By about noon Sunday, the first bouts of unrest had subsided. Hopes rose that it would prove a relatively minor, albeit ugly, incident.

• U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) speaks through a megaphone to a crowd at 12th and Clairmount streets on Sunday, July 23, in an attempt to quell rising tensions. "Stay cool, we're with you!" Conyers shouted. He was chased from the area.

• Police patrol 12th and Clairmount streets, the epicenter of the chaos.

• Police arrest a man on 12th Street on Sunday, July 23. In the decade leading up to the unrest, blacks made up about a third of Detroit's population. In 1967, they accounted for only 7 percent of the city's police force.

• Fire ravages a row of houses. At 4:30 p.m. Sunday, July 23, the fire department issued Signal 3-477, the order to muster all able-bodied firefighters. The code had been created during World War II, but not used until that day. Their charge: to douse the fires spreading across several areas of the city.

• A woman screams "Mother! Mother!" as a man forcibly removes her from a burning home on Sunday, July 23. Neither are identified.

• Fires spread along Grand River Avenue near Warren Boulevard, an area more than two miles from the epicenter of the civil disturbance. In all, the affected areas covered several square miles. "It looks like a city that has been bombed," Gov. Romney remarked after a helicopter tour.

Grand River near 12th St.

• Looters raid the A&P store on Grand Boulevard east of Linwood Street on Sunday, July 23, about a mile and a half from the epicenter of the chaos. Reports of looting began pouring in just an hour after the police raid that sparked the civil disturbance. Between looting and fires, more than 500 businesses were destroyed and another 500 damaged -- an estimated $50 million in damages.

• Looters smashed this store at Linwood and Pingree streets, about 6 blocks from the epicenter of the chaos, on Sunday, July 23. The shop next door has the word "soul" spray-painted on the windows. Black business owners rushed to mark their shops, hoping to be spared by looters. Despite their efforts, white- and black-owned businesses were damaged.

• Armed men guard a store against further looting on Monday, July 24. The first deaths attributed to the chaos happened Monday. That same day, dozens of reporters from around the world began to arrive in Detroit to record and broadcast the city's turmoil.

• Elder Maston and his dog guard his store on Monday, July 24, after the first full night of unrest.

• National Guardsmen clear an area near Taylor and Linwood streets on Monday, July 24. The first of some 3,000 Michigan National Guardsmen began to set up west of Woodward Avenue, from the Detroit River to Highland Park, late on Sunday, July 23. The young guardsmen had no training in crowd control.

• Firefighters work on a fire at Grand River Avenue and Myrtle Street on Monday, July 24. Fires reached a peak Monday with a staggering 617 alarms. By then, 44 other communities had volunteered men and equipment.

• Three-year-old Thomas Allen stands in the rubble of his burned-out Chene Street home on Monday, July 24. By late Sunday, the chaos had spread to Mack Avenue on the East Side, roughly 5 miles from where it started.

• Willie Moore, Elizabeth Allen, holding Thomas Allen, 3, and Louella Underwood kneel in the rubble of their home.

• Soldiers deliver children separated from their parents to a command post late on Monday, July 24. Fires and safety concerns drove about 1,000 families from their homes. The chaos temporarily scattered some families.

• Troops from the 82nd and 101st Airborn divisions arrive fully equipped at Selfridge Air Base on Monday, July 24. They were among some 4,700 federal troops airlifted to the Macomb County base that day. Federal paratroopers move into position in front of Southeast High School on Fairview Street. As looting and arson trailed off, a deadly guerilla warfare with snipers began. Paratroopers protected firefighters working to quell the city's blazes.

• Hospital staff treat injured residents at Detroit Receiving Hospital on Monday, July 24. Over days of chaos, 342 people were reported injured.

• Nuns at Visitation Church on Webb Street hand out food at a makeshift depot for citizens displaced by the civil disturbance on Tuesday, July 25.

• Police apprehend a group of suspected snipers at Temple and Trumbull streets on Tuesday, July 25.

• Resident William Keller views the hole from the bullet that killed businesswoman Helen Hall on the fourth floor of the Harlan House hotel near the John C. Lodge Freeway. A stray bullet struck her as she watched a gun battle between police and guardsmen on one side, and snipers on the other, at about 2 a.m. Wednesday, July 26.

• National Guardsmen SP4 Roger Drobney and Capt. Jerome Feldstein keep vigil in the rain Thursday, July 27. Gov. Romney had lifted a 9 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. curfew earlier that day, but was forced to reinstate it by 7 p.m. when sightseers jammed 12th Street. That night, guardsmen continued to search cars attempting to drive through affected areas.

• Troops from the U.S. Army, 505th Infantry cover a vacant house until police arrive on Thursday, July 27. Many had experience in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, and showed few signs of the jittery nerves evident in the National Guardsmen.

• Michael Johnson, 7, stands outside the Red Cross distribution center at 12th and Webb streets, guarding boxes of groceries for his mother.

• A truck bearing a sign that reads, "Tell that grocer to go to hell," passes out food on the West Side on Thursday, July 27. The sign refers to reported price gouging by some area grocery stores.

Prisoners make room in the Old Wayne County jail on Thursday, July 27. Floors of the jail meant to hold

200 people were crammed with as many as 500. "Some people were in there for a week because they had gotten lost in the system," Sheriff Deputy Cpl.

Larry Price said in a 1987 interview.

• A Detroit Police Department unit known as the "commandos" patrols Grand River Avenue on Thursday, July 27, after a day of sporadic sniping on the West Side. At right is a row of furniture stores gutted by fire.

Smoke billows from West Side housing projects on Friday, July 28. The last major fire of the civil disturbance erupted on 12th Street between Hazelwood and Taylor streets on Friday. That same day President Johnson announced the start of a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops.

• Medics remove a body from Manor House, an annex of the Algiers Motel at Virginia Park and Woodward Avenue on Wednesday, July 26. The most notorious deaths of the civil disturbance occurred when police, responding to reports of sniper fire, found 8 black youths and 2 white girls partying in the annex, an old brick house behind the motel. No arrests were made, but officers reportedly lined the group up against a wall and pistol-whipped them. Three hours later, the bodies of three black teenagers were found there by other officers. Carl Cooper, 17, Aubrey Pollard, 19, and Fred Temple, 18, were the 3 victims found at Manor House. Three police officers eventually were charged in 2 of the deaths, but none was convicted. The tragedy was later documented in a 1968 book by John Hersey titled "The Algiers Motel Incident."

• Algiers Motel defendants, from left, David Senak, 25, Ronald August, 31, Robert Paille, 34, all Detroit policemen, and private guard Melvin Dismukes, 26, talk to reporters Wednesday, Feb. 25, 1970, during a court recess. An all-white jury acquitted them on conspiracy charges relating to deaths of the three black teens

• Detroit Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and Sen. Philip Hart tour a ravaged area on Monday, July 31. In the wake of the civil disturbance, Cavanagh appointed department store magnate Joseph L. Hudson Jr. to a blue ribbon panel to plan for the aftermath.

• The devastation is still evident as Gov. Romney walks along 12th Street on Sept. 11, 1967.