Twice in his lifetime in Detroit, the old man watched his city burn. The first time was in 1943, when a race riot erupted amid the tensions of the wartime city, exposing the deep racial fault lines that ran through Detroit. But the second time, in the summer of 1967, was on a scale that shocked the entire nation, and it happened in part in the very area where the displaced families of Paradise Valley had been pushed. It began in the early morning hours of Sunday, the 23rd of July, 1967. Detroit police raided an illegal after-hours bar, a place known as a blind pig, above a print shop at the corner of 12th Street and Claremont Avenue.
Inside were 82 people gathered that night to celebrate the safe return of two local men from the war in Vietnam. The police arrested everyone and as they did, a crowd gathered on the street and years of accumulated anger boiled over. What followed was one of the most violent civil disturbances in American history. The unrest lasted 5 days. By the time it ended, 43 people were dead, more than 1,100 were injured, and over 7,000 had been arrested.
Around 1,400 buildings had been burned or looted, and entire city blocks were reduced to rubble. The governor called out the Michigan National Guard and President Johnson sent in the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. Tanks rolled down Woodward Avenue in an American city against American citizens. The causes were not a mystery to the old man because the causes were the story of his own life. The official commission that investigated the violence, the Kerner Commission, named them plainly.
The uprising had been fueled by unemployment and underemployment, by extreme and persistent poverty, by racism and segregation, by police brutality, and by the lack of economic and educational opportunity. The deindustrialization that was draining good jobs from the city, the housing discrimination that penned Black families into substandard neighborhoods, the destruction of communities like his own, all of it had built toward this explosion. The Kerner Commission delivered its conclusion in 1968 in words that have never lost their force. The nation, it warned, was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal. For the old man, that was not a prediction.
It was a description of the city he had lived in for half a century. The uprising of 1967 was a turning point, and not toward healing. The fires accelerated everything that was already destroying the city. They frightened away the white residents, and the businesses, and the investment. And they hardened the divisions that had caused them.
The old man, who had come to Detroit believing he was leaving the violence of the South behind, had now seen his northern city convulse in flame and bloodshed, with the army in its streets. And in the aftermath of the fire, the long, slow death of the city he had built only accelerated. The jobs that had drawn him north began to vanish in earnest. And the Detroit of his old age became a place of empty factories and fleeing neighbors.
The City He Built Empties Out.
By 1972, the old man lived in a city that was hollowing out around him. And the engine of its decline was the disappearance of the very industry that had built it. The auto plants that had drawn the Great Migration north, that had given him his $5 day and his hard years in the foundry, were leaving the city, automating, and shutting down. The process had been underway for decades, but it was relentless. The big automakers, beginning in the 1950s, had started to automate their assembly lines and to move parts production out to subcontractors in the suburbs and increasingly overseas.
Each new plant was built somewhere other than the city. Each round of automation meant fewer hands were needed. The east side of Detroit alone lost more than 70,000 jobs in the decade following the Second World War and the bleeding never truly stopped. For Black workers, the loss fell hardest as it always had. They were the men with the least seniority and the lowest job grades.
The ones who had been kept out of the skilled trades and concentrated in departments like the foundry. When the cuts came, the rule that had governed their whole working lives held true. The Black worker, hired last and promoted least, felt the brunt of the layoffs and the closures. The young Black men of the city, in particular, found that the industrial jobs that had lifted their fathers were simply no longer there. The people with means fled.
The white flight from Detroit, already underway, exploded after the uprising of 1967. In that single year, the number of white residents leaving the city doubled to more than 40,000 and it doubled again the next year. As they left, they took the tax base with them and the businesses and the investment. The insurance companies refused to write policies in the Black neighborhoods, treating whole sections of the city as too risky to cover. Detroit's population entered a long decline from which it would not recover.
For the old man, now retired from the work that had broken his body, this was the cruelest stage of all. He had given his life to build this city. He had endured the foundry, helped win the union, raised his family, and survived the fires. And now, in his old age, he sat in a city that was emptying out, surrounded by shuttered factories and abandoned buildings, watching the world he had helped create disappear. He lived modestly on whatever the union and the years had managed to secure for him in a Detroit that had far less to offer than the one he had arrived in.
The neighborhood was gone. The plants were closing. The neighbors were leaving. The promise that had once been measured in $5 a day had run its course. And what remained was a great industrial city in decline and an old man who remembered when it had been the promised land.
But the hardest blow of his final years was not the empty factories. It was the danger that now stalked the streets where his grandchildren walked. It was a danger that wore a badge.
STRESS: Killing More Than the Riots.