Detroit 1967: A 12th Street Blind Pig Raid, Algiers Motel and STRESS

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At 3:45 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, 1967, Detroit police raided a blind pig, an unlicensed after-hours club, on 12th Street and found 85 people celebrating two GIs back from Vietnam. Officers decided to arrest everyone, and the hours spent waiting for wagons drew a crowd. Detroit had been called a model city under Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, who brought in Great Society funds, but the episode lays out the pressures beneath that image. Federal redlining by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation locked Black residents out of mortgages, and the 12th Street area had twice the city's average population density. Detroit lost about 150,000 jobs to automation and suburban plants, inner city shoppers paid 20 percent more for groceries, and in a city about 30 percent Black the police force was 93 percent white.

After William Walter Scott III threw a bottle at an officer, looting began in what witnesses first described as a carnival atmosphere, and a local news blackout let word spread by mouth. Within a day more than 400 fires were burning. Governor George Romney asked for federal troops, but President Lyndon Johnson would not send them until Romney declared an insurrection under the 1807 Insurrection Act. Young, mostly white Michigan National Guardsmen, untrained for urban duty, fired heavily, while the integrated 82nd and 101st Airborne troops showed far more restraint. By July 28, 43 people were dead, 33 of them Black. The aftermath brought white flight and a police decoy unit called STRESS, and then a political shift that led to the election of Coleman Young, the city's first Black mayor, who disbanded STRESS.

• Motown star Martha Reeves stopped a show at the Fox Theatre to tell the audience to leave quietly, and Tigers outfielder Willie Horton stood on a car in his uniform asking the crowd to go home.
• Congressman John Conyers told the crowd we're with you, but this is not the way, and his car was pelted with rocks and bottles.
• Despite widespread reports of snipers, only one, Jack Sydnor, was ever caught, and four-year-old Tanya Blanding was killed when Guardsmen mistook a lit cigarette for a muzzle flash.
• At the Algiers Motel on July 25, police killed three unarmed Black teenagers, Carl Cooper, Aubrey Pollard and Fred Temple, and the charged officers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
• In a 2016 poll, 61 percent of white respondents called the events a riot, while many Black Detroiters called them a rebellion or uprising.