Detroit at crossroads 50 years after riots devastated the city

Associated Press

DETROIT

Girard Townsend is 66 now, living in a seniors building near the Detroit waterfront. But a half century ago, he was just a kid on a city bus.

The bus stopped near 12th and Clairmount streets. Townsend stepped off – and into the very start of the Detroit riot.

“I saw all these guys with masks and shields,” he said – city police officers, most of them white, far outnumbered by a seething black crowd.

In the days that followed, he would witness – and take part in – an epic eruption of violence that still reverberates in his life and the life of this city.

Five days of violence would leave 33 blacks and 10 whites dead, and more than 1,400 buildings burned. More than 7,000 people were arrested.

A decline that had already begun would accelerate; Detroit was the nation’s fourth-biggest city in 1960, but would rank 21st by 2016. The middle class fled, and a proud city fell into poverty, crime and hopelessness.

There are signs of rebirth in Detroit. But the men and women who lived through the riots are getting older, and most doubt they will live to see Detroit reclaim its former glory.

“Detroit still hasn’t come back to where it was,” Townsend said.

Detroit wasn’t the first of the riots in the summer of 1967, and it was far from the last. Buffalo, N.Y., and Newark, N.J., preceded it; in the course of the summer, more than 150 cases of civil unrest erupted across the U.S.

Detroit’s started after a July 23 police raid on an illegal after-hours’ club – a “blind pig” – at 12th and Clairmount.

The raid was just the spark. Many in the community blamed frustrations blacks felt toward the mostly white police, and city policies that pushed families into aging and overcrowded neighborhoods.

National Guard tanks and other armored vehicles rumbled through the streets. There were reports of snipers firing on law enforcement, the National Guard and even firefighters from rooftops and other secreted spots. Authorities fired back.

The city lost more than 2,000 shops to fires or looting, many of them owned by blacks. When the smoke cleared and the military rolled out, Detroit stood bruised and battered.

The departure of white residents and businesses to the suburbs that had started years earlier accelerated. Between 1970 and 1980 more than 400,000 more people would leave. Altogether, Detroit’s population has fallen by about 1.1 million people since the 1950s.

Within a decade of the riot, the car plants that provided jobs and helped keep the city running were hiring fewer people. Three years after the riot, Detroit’s unemployment rate was just over 7 percent. It reached 25 percent by 1990.

Today, nearly four in 10 Detroit residents live in poverty compared with about 15 percent nationally. The city’s $26,000 median income is less than half of the national figure.

Now, two years out of insolvency and free of billions of dollars of debt, Detroit is working to fix up its battered neighborhoods and image.

Though more than twice the national number, unemployment is down to 11 percent. Downtown is thriving. The city, 80 percent black, even elected Mike Duggan, Detroit’s first white mayor since the 1970s.

The population is leveling out at around 670,000 people and families are taking advantage of special home-buying programs through the city’s land bank.

But some who lived through the riots say any progress will not wipe away their distress in those five days of violence, and in the 50 years that followed.