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Ironically, New York—like Detroit —has launched a major summer enter tainment program designed to cool the ghettos by keeping the kids off the streets. "We have done everything in this city to make sure we have a stable summer," said Mayor John Lindsay. But after one of those "stabilizing" events, a Central Park rock-'n'-roll concert featuring Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, a boisterous band of some 150 Negroes wandered down toward midtown Manhattan, heaved trash baskets through the windows of three Fifth Avenue clothing stores and helped themselves. The looters' favorite was a $56 Austrian alpaca sweater, which is a status symbol in Harlem. Among the 23 whom police were able to catch: four Harlem summer antipoverty workers who earn up to $90 a week from the city.
Black & White. All of these were tame enough alongside Detroit. The violence there last week was not a race riot in the pattern of the day-long 1943 battle between Negroes and whites that left 34 known dead. Last week poor whites in one section along Grand River Avenue joined teams of young Negroes in some integrated looting. When the rioters began stoning and sniping at firemen trying to fight the flames, many Negro residents armed themselves with rifles and deployed to protect the firemen. "They say they need protection," said one such Negro, "and we're damned well going to give it to them." Negro looters screamed at a well-dressed Negro psychiatrist: "We're going to get you rich niggers next."
Detroit has no single massive ghetto. Its Negroes, lower, middle and upper income, are scattered all over the city, close to or mixed in with white residents. But unemployment is high among Negroes (6% to 8% v. the over all national level of 4%) and housing is often abominable. It is particularly ramshackle, crowded and expensive around the scabrous environs of Twelfth Street, once part of a prosperous Jewish section.
"They Won't Shoot." When the trouble began outside Twelfth Street's blind pig, the 10th precinct at that early hour could muster only 45 men. Detroit police regard the dawn hours of Sunday, when the action is heaviest in many slums, as a "light period." The precinct captain rushed containing squads to seal off the neighborhood for 16 square blocks. Police Commissioner Ray Girardin decided, because of his previous success with the method, to instruct his men to avoid using their guns against the looters. That may have been a mistake.
As police gave ground, the number of looters grew. "They won't shoot," an eleven-year-old Negro boy said coolly, as a pack of looters fled at the approach of a busload of police. "The mayor said they aren't supposed to."
At 6:30 a.m., the first fire was in a shoe store. When fire engines screamed to the scene, rocks flew. One fireman, caught squarely in the jaw, was knocked from a truck to the gutter. More and more rioters were drawn to the streets by the sound of the sirens and a sense of summer excitement.