Last Word on the Riots

For weeks I've been waiting for the right moment to weigh in on this month's Big Story -- the 40th anniversary of the "riots" that took place in Detroit the week of July 23, 1967. Journalists, historians and academicians have been tapping feverishly at their keyboards to render their weighty opinions of what really happened and the affect it has had on our great city. I've been reading as much as I can -- the Detroit News has been running a special section called "Panic in Detroit." I've read Jack Lessenberry in Metro Times, Paul Lee in the Michigan Citizen, Jack Anderson in the Chronicle, Julia Vitullo-Martin in the Wall Street Journal, and many more. There is nothing I can add to this body of work, so I will just throw out a few observations:

The riot-rebellion did not kill the city. There is no question that the riot-rebellion was the single-most hurtful event in the devastation of Detroit, but the city's decline was already in motion. White flight began in the fifties. The suburbs and shopping malls were already growing rapidly. The expressways were already in place, criss-crossing through the city, sucking the dollars and life out of it, after destroying wide swaths of viable neighborhoods and dislocating thousands of mostly lower class whites and blacks. The riot-rebellion expedited a process that was already happening. It just poured gas on the fire.

We'll never know what Detroit would have been like had the riots never occurred. If they hadn't, perhaps today's Detroit would be about 65 percent black, rather than the 90 percent it is. It makes me mad to have to say it, but a better balance between black and white would have meant a stronger tax base, something we lost with the flight of the white (and now black) middle-class.

Without the riot-rebellion, possibly 30 percent of the commercial development that occurred along the Northwestern-Lodge corridor and in other parts of Oakland County in the past 40 years would have taken place downtown. Then, downtown never would have hit the skids that it did in the late seventies before slowly recovering to what it is today. Without '67, our neighborhoods would still have had serious problems, but the entire city would not look like today's "one huge ghetto" -- except for maybe five pockets of good neighborhoods that we have now. Without '67, the school system perhaps would have fared better, but I really don't know.

And reliable sources say maybe we would not have lost Motown Records had the riot-rebellion not happened. According to the Wall Street Journal story: "The riots had propelled one of the greatest black economic engines the country had ever known -- Motown Records, founded in 1959 -- to eventually depart for Los Angeles. After receiving a taunting phone call that Motown would burn to the ground by Halloween, founder Berry Gordy moved most operations to a secure office building close to downtown, away from the riots he had called 'a hurricane of rage.'"

None of us will every really know. That's all I have to say about the riots.