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Spreading Fires. Rushing to Detroit at midday Sunday, Michigan's Governor George Romney called in 370 state troopers to beef up the defenses, then by late afternoon ordered 7,000 National Guardsmen mobilized.
Through the night the contagion spread. The small cities of Highland Park and Hamtramck, whose boundaries are encircled by Detroit, were under siege by looters. A four-mile section of Woodward Avenue was plundered. Twenty blocks of Grand River Avenue were in flames. Helicopters with floodlights chattered over the rooftops while police on board with machine guns squinted for the muzzle fire of snipers, who began shooting sporadically during the night.
Before dawn, Romney, Cavanagh and Negro Congressman Charles Diggs began their day-long quest for the intervention of federal troops (see following story). Detroit's jails were jammed far past capacity, and police converted part of their cavernous garage at headquarters into a noisome, overflowing detention center.
Recorder's Court began marathon sessions to arraign hundreds of prisoners herded in from the riot areas. In twelve hours, Judge Robert J. Colombo heard more than 600 not-guilty pleas. To keep the arrested off the streets until the city stopped smoking, bonds were set at $25,000 for suspected looters, $200,000 for suspected snipers. Said the harassed judge to one defendant: "You're nothing but a lousy, thieving looter. It's too bad they didn't shoot you."
Empty Streets. As Detroit's convulsion continued into the week, homes and shops covering a total area of 14 square miles were gutted by fire. While U.S. Army paratroopers skillfully quieted their assigned trouble area on the East Side, National Guardsmen, jittery and untrained in riot control, exacerbated the trouble where it all started, on Twelfth Street (see box). Suspecting the presence of snipers in the Algiers Motel, Guardsmen laid down a brutal barrage of automatic-weapons fire. When they burst into a motel room, they found three dead Negro teen-age boys—and no weapon. The Guardsmen did have cause to be nervous about snipers. Helen Hall, a Connecticut woman staying at the Harlan House Motel just two blocks from Detroit's famed Fisher Building, on the fringe of the riots, walked to a hallway window Tuesday night to see what the shooting was about. She died with a sniper's bullet in her heart.
By Tuesday morning, Detroit was shrouded in acrid smoke. The Edsel Ford and John C. Lodge freeways were nearly deserted. Tens of thousands of office and factory workers stayed home. Downtown streets that are normally jammed were almost empty. Looters smashed the windows of a Saks Fifth Avenue branch near the General Motors office building, made off with furs and dresses. With many grocery stores wrecked and plundered throughout the city, food became scarce. Some profiteering merchants were charging as much as $ 1 for bread.
Well of Nihilism. George Romney had a terse evaluation of the chaos: "There were some civil rights overtones, but primarily this is a case of lawlessness and hoodlumism. Disobedience to the law cannot and will not be tolerated."