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At midnight, Hubert G. Locke, a Negro who is administrative assistant to the police commissioner, left his desk at headquarters and climbed to the roof for a look at Detroit. When he saw it, he wept. Beneath him, whole sections of the nation's fifth largest city lay in charred, smoking ruins. From Grand River Avenue to Gratiot Avenue six miles to the east, tongues of flame licked at the night sky, illuminating the angular skeletons of gutted homes, shops, supermarkets. Looters and arsonists danced in the eerie shadows, stripping a store clean, then setting it to the torch. Mourned Mayor Jerome Cavanagh: "It looks like Berlin in 1945."
In the violent summer of 1967, Detroit became the scene of the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in terms of property damage in U.S. history. At week's end, there were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000 people were homeless (the vast majority Negro), while 1,300 buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks and 2,700 businesses sacked. Damage estimates reached $500 million. The grim accounting surpassed that of the Watts riot in Los Angeles where 34 died two years ago and property losses ran to $40 million. More noteworthy, the riot surpassed those that had preceded it in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 in a more fundamental way. For here was the most sensational expression of an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a small but significant segment of America's Negro minority.
Blind Pig. Typically enough, Detroit's upheaval started with a routine police action. Seven weeks ago, in the Virginia Park section of the West Side, a "blind pig" (afterhours club) opened for business on Twelfth Street, styling itself the "United Community League for Civic Action." Along with the afterhours booze that it offered to minors, the "League" served up black-power harangues and curses against Whitey's exploitation. It was at the blind pig, on a sleazy strip of pawnshops and bars, rats and pimps, junkies and gamblers, that the agony began.
Through an informant, police were kept advised of the League's activities. At 1:45 a.m. Sunday, the informant, a wino and ex-convict, passed the word (and was paid 50¢ for it): "It's getting ready to blow." Two hours later, 10th Precinct Sergeant Arthur Howison led a raid on the League, arresting 73 Negro customers and the bartender. In the next hour, while squad cars and a paddy wagon ferried the arrested to the police station, a crowd gathered, taunting the fuzz and "jiving" with friends who had been picked up. "Just as we were pulling away," Howison said, "a bottle smashed a squad-car window." Then it began.