Day 7 The following is my account of the 1967 Detroit Riot, as excerpted from a diary I kept and I am now posting, in advance of each day, 50 years later.
Saturday July 29 1967
"I got up about 10 AM and spent the day with Greg Pillon. We went over to Eastern High School, on the Eastside, and arranged to have friend of Greg’s, who was in the 101st Airborne, and bivouacked there, get a pass by telling his commanding officer that Greg's father was his uncle [even though he wasn’t].
"We then took him on a tour of the city including the riot-torn 12th St. area that was badly demolished."
The riot experience gave me an early lesson in media coverage—that the viewpoint provided is like looking though a straw. 12th Street, from East Grand Blvd. to Clairmont, was severely damaged and burned out. In a few cases the fires spread to nearby residential houses. 12th Street became the poster child for the riot and that was were the media straw was aimed.
Still photographers could get the long shots down the street of destruction fading into the distance. Movie film crews in helicopters could get the dramatic rolling block-after-block destruction shot.
But pull off into a side street and life was normal, as if nothing was changed.
The physical damage to Detroit could be likened to a series of tornados that plowed down four or five store-lined avenues, then bounced about and hit a other random spots. Otherwise the 139 square mile city of over 1.5 million with its hundreds of thousands of buildings was untouched.
The psychological damage, however, was immense.
"Tonight the curfew was extended until 11 PM. I only heard one gunshot all night. The peace seems to be here. Rumors say the curfew will end tomorrowalong with [the alcohol sales] prohibition. [Other] rumors also say that there are over 200 unidentified bodies in the city morgue."
"I hope peace is here to stay."
The peace stayed. On Tuesday August 1, ten days after the riot began, the last curfew was lifted and I finally got in a full day's work. Other than a quickly-contained small riot in 1975, sometimes called the Bolton's Bar Riot, sometimes the Livernois–Fenkell riot, and a fan riot following the 1984 Detroit Tigers World Series victory, the peace has remained for 50 years.
Sadly economic devastation, with its companions of poverty, abandonment, crime and gun violence would take thousands of lives and lead to the destruction of tens of thousands of houses and businesses in the fifty years that have followed. Detroit's decline was well in motion by 1967 but still invisible. 1967 would be the ton of bricks, not the straw, that broke the camel's back.
Read: Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6