This is an interesting Metro Times article that is mostly about the 1943 riot, but it discusses the differences between 1943 and 1967:

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=5041

“The one in ’43 was a real riot, and that’s frightening,” says writer Marvin Arnett. “Let me take you to the ’67 riot, OK — which always kind of irks me when they say ‘riot,’ because it wasn’t a riot, it was economic upheaval. And I’ll tell you what happened [in ’67]. I stood on my porch, I was an adult, and watched people looting Robinson’s Furniture Store down on Grand River, and they were taking out sofas and chairs, and there would be a black man on one end of that sofa and a white man on the other end. That doesn’t seem like a race riot to me. It was more economic, it was more the ‘have-nots’ giving the ‘haves’ some trouble.”