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Rocks and bottles flew. Looting, at first dared by only a few, became a mob delirium as big crowds now gathered, ranging through the West Side, then spilling across Woodward Avenue into the East Side. Arsonists lobbed Molotov cocktails at newly pillaged stores. Fires started in the shops, spread swiftly to homes and apartments. Snipers took up posts in windows and on rooftops. For four days and into the fifth, mobs stole, burned and killed as a force of some 15,000 city and state police, National Guardsmen and federal troops fought to smother the fire. The city was almost completely paralyzed.
It Can't Happen Here. For the last couple of years, city officials had been saying proudly: "That sort of thing can't happen here." It had seemed a reasonable enough prediction.
Fully 40% of the city's Negro family heads own their own homes. No city has waged a more massive and comprehensive war on poverty. Under Mayor Jerry Cavanagh, an imaginative liberal with a knack for landing Government grants, the city has grabbed off $42 million in federal funds for its poverty programs, budgeted $30 million for them this year alone. Because many of the city's 520,000 Negroes (out of a population of 1,600,000) are unequipped to qualify for other than manual labor, some $10 million will go toward special training and placement programs for the unskilled and the illiterate. A $4,000,000 medical program furnishes family-planning advice, outpatient clinics and the like. To cool any potential riot fever, the city had allotted an additional $3,000,000 for this summer's Head Start and recreation programs. So well did the city seem to be handling its problems that Congress of Racial Equality Director Floyd McKissick excluded Detroit last winter when he drew up a list of twelve cities where racial trouble was likely to flare.
Anywhere. McKissick's list has proved to be woefully incomplete. So far this summer, some 70 cities—40 in the past week alone—have been hit. In the summer of 1967, "it" can happen anywhere, and sometimes seems to be happening everywhere. Detroit's outbreak was followed by a spate of eruptions in neighboring Michigan cities—Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Flint, Muskegon, West Michigan City and Pontiac, where a state assemblyman, protecting the local grocery that he had owned for years, shot a 17-year-old Negro looter to death. White and Negro vandals burned and looted in Louisville. Philadelphia's Mayor James Tate declared a state of limited emergency as rock-throwing Negro teen-agers pelted police prowl cars. A dozen youths looted a downtown Miami pawnshop and ran off with 20 rifles, leaving other merchandise untouched. Some 200 Negroes in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., smashed downtown store windows. In Arizona, 1,500 National Guard members were alerted when sniper fire and rock throwing broke out in Phoenix.
In New York's East Harlem, Puerto Ricans broke windows, looted and sniped from rooftops for three nights after a policeman fatally shot a man who had pulled a knife on him. At one point, the youths who led the rioting drew a chalk line across Third Avenue and tauntingly wrote: "Puerto Rican territory. Don't cross, flatfoot."