Detroit 1967 Riot: Willie Horton's Plea, Guard Panic and Phantom Snipers

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At 3:45 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police raided an after-hours blind pig in a 12th Street printing office and found 85 people celebrating two GIs back from Vietnam. The episode traces the pressure behind that night: federal redlining that gave Black areas D ratings, restrictive covenants written into deeds, urban renewal that leveled Black Bottom and Paradise Valley for the Chrysler Freeway, roughly 150,000 jobs lost to the suburbs, and a city about 30 percent Black patrolled by a force 93 percent white, including the feared Big Four squads.

A bottle thrown during the slow arrests, which William Walter Scott III later admitted throwing, set off looting that began in a carnival atmosphere. Local media tried a news blackout, while Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, Governor George Romney and President Lyndon Johnson delayed over troops. By Monday nearly 500 fires burned. The mostly white, rural Michigan National Guard fired at perceived snipers, while integrated 82nd and 101st Airborne paratroopers kept rifles unloaded and killed one civilian. Of more than 7,000 arrests, 26 were for sniping and none led to a successful prosecution, pointing to friendly fire.

• Tigers left fielder Willie Horton drove into the riot zone in uniform and pleaded with crowds from the hood of a car.
• Four-year-old Tanya Blanding was killed when a Guard tank fired a .50 caliber machine gun at a window where someone lit a cigarette.
• Joe's Record Shop on 12th Street, where early Aretha Franklin tracks were recorded, was ruined and never reopened.
• The toll was 43 dead, more than 2,000 buildings damaged and $40 million in losses, and 173,000 white residents left within two years.
• Romney passed a fair housing act, and Coleman Young became mayor in 1974 and abolished the STRESS decoy unit.