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"The noise of destruction adds to its satisfaction," Elias Canetti notes in Crowds and Power. "The banging of windows and smashing of glass are the robust sounds of fresh life, the cries of something newborn." In Detroit, they proved to be—with the rattling of gunfire—the sounds of death. Throughout the Detroit riot there was—as in Newark—a spectacularly perverse mood of gaiety and light-hearted abandon in the mob—a "carnival spirit," as a shocked Mayor Cavanagh called it, echoing the words used by New Jersey's Governor Richard Hughes after he toured stricken Newark three weeks ago.
"Sold Brother." Looters skipped gingerly over broken glass to rake in wrist watches and clothing from shop windows. One group of hoods energetically dismantled a whole front porch and lobbed the bricks at police. Two small boys struggled down Twelfth Street with a load of milk cartons and a watermelon. Another staggered from a supermarket under the weight of a side of beef. One prosperous Negro used his Cadillac convertible to haul off a brand-new deep freeze.
Some of the looters were taking a methodical revenge upon the area's white merchants, whose comparatively high prices, often escalated to offset losses by theft and the cost of extra-high insurance premiums, irk the residents of slum neighborhoods. Most of the stores pillaged and destroyed were groceries, supermarkets and furniture stores; of Detroit's 630 liquor stores, 250 were looted. Many drunks careened down Twelfth Street consuming their swag. Negro merchants scrawled "Soul Brother"—and in one case, "Sold Brother" —on their windows to warn the mobs off. But many of their stores were ravaged nonetheless.
Into Next Year. The mobs cared nothing for "Negro leadership" either. When the riot was only a few hours old, John Conyers, one of Detroit's two Negro Congressmen, drove up Twelfth Street with Hubert Locke and Deputy School Superintendent Arthur Johnson. "Stay cool, we're with you!" Conyers shouted to the crowd. "Uncle Tom!" they shouted back. Someone heaved a bottle and the leaders beat a prompt retreat, not wanting to become "handkerchief heads" in the bandaged sense of the epithet. "You try to talk to these people," said Conyers unhappily, "and they'll knock you into the middle of next year."
Riots and looting spread through the afternoon over a 10.8-sq.-mi. area of the West Side almost as far north as the Northland Shopping Center. An entire mile of Twelfth Street was a corridor of flame; firemen answering the alarms were pelted with bricks, and at one point they abandoned their hoses in the streets and fled, only to be ordered back to the fire by Cavanagh.
Some 5,000 thieves and arsonists were ravaging the West Side. Williams Drug Store was a charred shell by dusk. More than one grocery collapsed as though made of Lincoln Logs. A paint shop erupted and took the next-door apartment house with it. In many skeletal structures the sole sign of life was a wailing burglar alarm. Lou's Men's Wear expired in a ball of flame. Meantime, a mob of 3,000 took up the torch on the East Side several miles away. The Weather Bureau's tornado watch offered brief hope of rain to damp the fires, but it never came.