Tagged: detroit riots

This week marks an important anniversary that is being virtually ignored. We paid attention five years ago, and will again five years from now. We prefer round numbers.

But given what’s happening today, it makes sense to note that it’s been exactly 45 years since the legendary riot that devastated Detroit for four days during another hot summer.

The causes of the riot have been endlessly debated. Who was most responsible is still in dispute. But the effects are plain. It wouldn’t be too much to say that what happened in 1967 killed Detroit, slowly but certainly.

The burned-down buildings were cleared away. The 43 dead were buried, and money came from Washington and the private sector to try to make things better.

But it all failed. The riot put the pedal to the metal on a flood of white flight that had already begun. Detroit was still more than 60 percent white when the riot began.

Forty-five years ago this week, Detroit erupted into five days of racial violence that left 43 people dead, more than 450 injured, and thousands of buildings burned and looted.

Many people are still trying to get a handle on what that event really signified—and what to call it.

Dan Krichbaum clearly remembers the scene from 1967 as he drove from Ann Arbor to southwest Detroit, where he headed a small Methodist congregation.

The 1967 Detroit riot was five days of chaos, sparked by a small incident, but driven by a deeper unrest among black Detroiters, mistreated for years by the city's whites. Michigan Radio's Dustin Dwyer produced an account of what happened those five days from three people who lived it first-hand.