City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit

OCTOBER 10, 1968

A year after the uprising, the Tigers’ World Series win briefly unites a traumatized city.

Showers of confetti burst out of the windows and floated through the streets, strangers kissed and boogied on the sidewalks, bikers shared their beers with cops, and the entire city reverberated with the sound of thousands of honking cars, with jubilant teenagers sitting on the roofs and jumping on and off the hoods.1 Thirty thousand fans set off to the Metropolitan Airport to welcome home the victorious Tigers. The traffic jam was ten miles long, and lots of fans simply abandoned their cars and walked on. They jumped over fences and barriers, littered the runway with broken bottles, and a bunch of them climbed onto the fuselage of a plane—doing enough damage to force air traffic control to close the runways. Fourteen outgoing flights were canceled. Governor Romney flew in on his private jet, but he couldn’t persuade the crowd to go home. It was almost 10 p.m. by the time services were restored, and the team had been diverted to land at Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, twenty-five miles west.² Thousands of savvy fans had sussed out the detour and welcomed the winners, along with Mayor Jerome Cavanagh and Governor Romney, who described the chaotic scene as “just fantastic.”³

At Tiger Stadium that night, the impatient crowd got rowdy and threw beer cans at the police, who retaliated by beating the fans with night sticks.⁴ The city went crazy, but with only some exceptions, in the most joyous way.⁵ “City officials reported no damage during the spontaneous downtown carnival and only 11 arrests, for public drunkenness,” Billy McGraw recalled in 2018, though there must have been some fudging involved.⁶ It could have been any celebration of a spectacular win in any city in America. But the 1968 celebrations were hailed as more than that. Reportedly, team owner John Fetzer told its manager, Mayo Smith, “You’ve not only won the pennant and the series, you might have saved the city.”7 Even earlier, after Detroit secured the pennant, the Detroit Free Press proclaimed that “for one brief, shining moment after Detroit won the American League pennant, blacks and whites mingled in color-blind joy, thousands strong, on the streets of downtown Detroit,” and asked, rather hyperbolically, “why, 13 months after the costliest riot in American history, did blacks and whites love one another without reservation?”⁸

Needless to say, no sports event, however glorious, will ever be able to shoulder the burden of healing a city in that much pain. The jubilant coverage does underscore sports’ unique capacity to elicit raw emotion, frequently for worse but often for better as well, and while it is beyond its power to create “love without reservation,” one evening filled with a sense of togetherness is not nothing. The city needed a win as badly as ever a city did. It was not in good shape. That same night, a teenager was shot below the right eye and killed at the corner of Clifford and Woodward, about five hundred yards away from Campus Martius. Another man was shot and killed as he walked to his car parked on Sibley Street, where Little Caesars Arena now stands. In Capitol Park, two people were critically injured by stab wounds, one in the abdomen, the other to the throat. On Kercheval, passing cars were stoned. Looting broke out on Woodward, with the window display of a hosiery store emptied and broken windows reported by numerous store owners. Twenty-five-year old Larry Adkins was robbed of $17 by three thugs who then stabbed him in the back.⁹ If those events weren’t mentioned much—the Free Press relegates them to page B-4—then it’s because they didn’t really stand out.

It’s too bad that the Tigers hadn’t made it in 1967. That season, the team was formidable. The typically strong batting lineup was led by Al Kaline, an obvious Hall of Famer at the peak of his career. Willie Horton, the local lad, was starting to make a big impact. For once, the Tigers had strong pitching too. Youngsters Mickey Lolich, Joe Sparma, and Denny McLain were boasting ERAs of under 4, while veteran Earl Wilson was having one of the best seasons of his career. By September 1967, Chicago, Minnesota, Detroit, and Boston were in a four-way tie for the pennant. By the end of the month, the Tigers were still in it, but doubts were creeping in: the team had blown four games after leading in the eighth inning or later. So now it all came down to the last weekend of the regular season. Minnesota, the leaders, would play two games in Boston, who were one game behind, while Detroit, also one game behind and delayed by rain cancelations, had to play two doubleheaders against the California Angels at Tiger Stadium.

On Saturday, the Tigers won the first game thanks to the pitching of Mickey Lolich and then blew a four-run lead in the second game. Meanwhile Boston beat Minnesota, and so these two were now level. Whoever won in Boston on Sunday would have 92 wins for the season. Detroit, with 90, therefore needed to win both Sunday games, which would get them into a one-game playoff for the pennant.10

They did win the first one, but the second would be their undoing. Detroit went out to a 2–1 lead, but quickly fell behind, and by the bottom of the ninth, they were trailing 8–5. With runners on first and second, Dick McAuliffe (who had 22 homers for the season) went to the plate as the tying run. It was not to be. McAuliffe hit a grounder straight to second base, who threw to first, and with the double play the Tigers’ season was over.¹¹

Even with the season on the line, one-third of the seats in Tiger Stadium that day were empty.¹² When the game ended, the fans who had attended vented their disappointment by throwing their seats—about five hundred of them—onto the field. Home plate was stolen, others tried to dig up the pitcher’s mound. The visiting team dugout was vandalized, the lightbulbs on the scoreboard were taken, telephones were broken. One fan was arrested for attacking a policeman. Watching from the owner’s box, John Fetzer wrote a letter to himself, which later became public. “They destroyed scores of stadium seats and piled the rubble in the dugouts. Still others clawed at home plate and the pitcher’s mound, while a bedlam of confusion turned many more hundreds into a near mob scene with the elements of combat everywhere on the playing field.” He then ended on an odd note: “John Fetzer has just died, this is his ghost speaking.”¹³

As we know from countless examples, vandalism is not a monopoly of the losers. In Boston, the Red Sox won their last game and took the pennant. In the ensuing celebrations, fans invaded the field at Fenway Park and refused to leave until the staff turned on the sprinklers. Several kids tried to climb into the broadcast booth, and an injured fan was found collapsed in the Minnesota dugout that had been ripped apart by other fans. The wild scenes of celebration across Boston were near indistinguishable from the scenes of riotous despair in Detroit.14

Even if Detroit was hit particularly hard, the 1960s were an exceptionally violent decade across the United States as a whole. All forms of crime increased dramatically. Between 1960 and 1970, across the country total reported crime rate per 100,000 people doubled, as did the rate of property crimes and aggravated assault. Violent crimes and vehicle theft more than doubled. The homicide rate actually increased more slowly than any other crime category, but still increased by more than 50 percent.¹⁵ In this regard, the scenes at baseball games mirrored general phenomena in the big cities. Criminologists have found that urban crime rates rose faster than elsewhere, and the larger the city, the faster the rate of increase, at least with regard to robberies and homicide.¹⁶

There was no single cause of the rise in crime. The period was one of growing instability and social conflict, driven in part by resistance to the civil rights movement on the right, and to protests against the war in Vietnam on the left. As social barriers that had stabilized an unjust order slowly and painfully broke down, factors such as relative and absolute deprivation, poverty and racial inequality, the breakdown of social control via traditional patriarchal family structures, and disorganization due to urban decline have all been found to correlate positively with higher crime rates.¹⁷ While both dog whistles and foghorns increasingly began to blame African Americans, a growing propensity for violence was an all-American affair. Look at photographs from the era, and you will see that the intermittent mayhem at the baseball stadiums of the 1960s is instigated and enjoyed by a predominantly white audience. That was certainly true for Tiger Stadium.

The 1960s was a roller-coaster decade for African Americans. There were the unquestionably great strides of the civil rights era, with the Jim Crow laws of the South ruled unconstitutional at last. Legal segregation officially ended, and the civil rights acts passed—even if it had taken a shockingly long time to get politicians and the courts to uphold the most basic promises of the U.S. Constitution. While much of the New Deal legislation had origi nally excluded African Americans in large numbers—Social Security, for instance, did not include agricultural and domestic workers—benefits were beginning to be a little more equitably distributed, and the War on Poverty provided gains for the poorest in society, among whom the black population was disproportionately represented.

At the same time, 1960s Detroit was also the city of Motown, the most successful black-owned business in the country at the time. Founded on a shoe-string budget by native Detroiter Berry Gordy, a former featherweight boxer, Motown began churning out No. 1 hits starting in 1961, and it was “becoming bigger than music,” as Kelley L. Carter writes for The Undefeated.18 The record label was fundamentally shifting the industry, desegregating pop music. Motown has been criticized “for what some believed was a disgraceful practice of making black singers palatable to a white audience,” in David Nantais’s telling, but there is no dispute that Diana Ross & the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Marvelettes, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, and so many others revolutionized the music scene and made Detroit the center of that revolution.¹⁹

Motown is often understood to have developed a deliberately political identity characterized by socially conscious lyrics and a strong anti–Vietnam War stance only after it left the city in the wake of the uprising. But Marvin Gaye’s anti-war album What’s Going On (1971) was still recorded in Detroit, and as early as 1964, Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing in the Street” was an exuberant celebration of black cities: “Philadelphia, PA (Dancing in the street) / Baltimore and D.C. now (Dancing in the street) / Can’t forget the Motor City (Dancing in the street).” There is reason to be skeptical of the “usual tale of Motown’s politics—a story that dramatically locates Motown’s political breakthrough in Gaye’s 1971 artistic triumph.”²⁰ While the company did by and large seek to have its records seen “as music” rather than “as black music,” as Motown songwriter and producer William “Mickey” Stevenson stresses, Motown recorded Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as early as 1963, and Motown’s “Black Forum” label, a series of civil rights recordings, debuted with a 1967 recording of another King speech, “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam.”²¹ Music and politics were intimately connected in civil rights–era America, and Detroit was no exception.²²

The victories, however, had come at a very steep price. The struggle had been protracted and often bloody, and it took near endless campaigns and protests to draw the country’s attention to the gross injustice committed daily in its midst—a task in which the new medium of television helped quite a bit. Titans of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, were assassinated, along with allies such as Bobby Kennedy. The rising homicide rate mostly affected black families—much of inner-city violence was black on black, just as most white homicide was and remains white on white. The police force remained overwhelmingly white and largely hostile to the black community—abuse, beatings, and worse were an everyday experience for many black people. White supremacists weren’t giving up, and not even lynchings had stopped entirely.

In 1966, one year before the Detroit uprising, James Baldwin wrote for The Nation an essay he called “A Report from Occupied Territory,” where he describes the horrifying police regime that ruled over African Americans:

I have witnessed and endured the brutality of the police many more times than once—but, of course, I cannot prove it. I cannot prove it because the Police Department investigates itself, quite as though it were answerable only to itself. But it cannot be allowed to be answerable only to itself. It must be made to answer to the community which pays it, and which it is legally sworn to protect, and if American Negroes are not a part of the American community, then all of the American professions are a fraud. This arrogant autonomy, which is guaranteed the police, not only in New York, by the most powerful forces in American life—otherwise, they would not dare to claim it, would indeed be unable to claim it—creates a situation which is as close to anarchy as it already, visibly, is close to martial law.23

In the same essay, he points out that “what I have said about Harlem is true of Chicago, Detroit, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco—is true of every Northern city with a large Negro population. And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population.”

The same point emerges from Chris Hayes’s book A Colony in a Nation: the rise of organized protests in the era along with the rise of violent crime (which wouldn’t reach its zenith until 1992) led to a new form of segregation, a bifurcated system of justice and policing that equated disorder with unlawfulness—at least for the black population. Hayes writes:

The American criminal justice isn’t one system with massive racial disparities but two distinct regimes. One (the Nation) is the kind of policing regime you expect in a democracy; the other (the Colony) is the kind you expect in an occupied land. Policing is a uniquely important and uniquely dangerous function of the state. Dictatorships and totalitarian regimes use the police in horrifying ways; we call them “police states” for a reason. But the terrifying truth is that we as a people have created the Colony through democratic means. We have voted to subdue our fellow citizens; we have rushed to the polls to elect people promising to bar others from enjoying the fruits of liberty. A majority of Americans have put a minority under lock and key. In her masterful 2010 chronicle of American mass incarceration, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander argues convincingly that our current era represents not a shift from previous eras of white supremacy and black oppression but continuity with them. After the 1960s, she contends, when Jim Crow was dismantled as a legal entity, it was reconceived and reborn through mass incarceration.24

It is important to keep in mind that the black minority of the 1960s was not united in its reaction to the developments of the decade. As Hubert Locke put it, a “common assumption in the white community appears to have bordered on the belief that at birth every Negro receives a life-time membership of the NAACP, which in turn speaks ex-cathedra for all Negroes.”²⁵ Black opinions about the best strategies to pursue varied considerably, even within the civil rights movement. But both Martin Luther King Jr, who advocated nonviolent means, and Malcolm X, who favored armed resistance, were bitterly resented and eventually killed by those who did not want equality, whether pursued by peaceful or by violent means. In these times of turmoil, upheaval broke out in cities across the country.

The killing of African-Americans and the destruction of their homes and commercial and institutional buildings and structures in Greenwood was an officially sanctioned event…. Certainly the event could be called a “riot,” but it was a riot by whites…. But, then, “riot” is rather imprecise since it blurs the willful, the organized nature of such events. Riot? Well, certainly it is a question of a pogrom against the African-American community.26

It should come as no surprise that Detroit has seen its share of these pogroms, along with many other battles such as an uprising of Polish workers in 1894 and the Battle of the Overpass, to which we will return later.

In Detroit an altercation between police and black youths erupted on August 9, 1966, at the corner of Kercheval and Pennsylvania on the East Side.²⁷ Riot police were immediately sent to the scene; community leaders who were working with the police, under the liberal regime of Mayor Cavanagh, identified revolutionary black activists; a car carrying weapons was intercepted. Tensions remained high the following day and trouble was expected in the evening, but a heavy rain appeared to cool down tempers, and there was no further violence. Cavanagh’s administration touted the peaceful resolution as proof that its progressive policies were working, and were helping the city avoid the extremes witnessed across the rest of the country. To others, the spin hid the truth about the origins of the unrest: it happened right next to Lafayette Park and the old Black Bottom neighbor hoods, where successive administrations had perpetrated their urban renewal schemes—we will return to those stories later. Many black Detroiters saw it as James Baldwin did: “Urban renewal means black removal.”28

A year later, it would become abundantly clear that the tensions could not be contained—and in retrospect, both contemporary witnesses and historians of urban America would argue that it had always been a question of not of “if” but “when.” What would commonly be known as “the Detroit Riots” broke out after a police raid on an illegal after-hours drinking club, locally known as a “blind pig.” It was around 3:45 a.m. on Sunday, July 23, on the corner of Twelfth Street and Clairmount, six blocks west of Woodward in midtown. Here, there was a dense strip of stores centered around a growing black community that had been pushed out by the urban renewal machinations, moving into neighborhoods abandoned by white Detroiters who had left for the suburbs. All summer long, tension had simmered between the police and neighborhood groups who suspected that the widespread prostitution in the area—catering to white male clients from the suburbs—was sanctioned and protected by the police, who did not, so the accusations went, act on neighborhood complaints and demands for action.²⁹

After the raid, eighty-two people were arrested and driven off, but in the process, a large crowd started to gather and some bottles began to fly. The discontent gathered momentum into the early morning as the police mobilized and community leaders sought to restore calm. By 11 a.m. it became apparent that the angry crowd would not go home, as the police demanded, and while the area around the blind pig was under police control, more crowds were starting to gather at the edges. By late afternoon, reports of looting and arson along Grand River Avenue, Woodward, and Gratiot emerged, extending across larger and larger parts of the city. By the end of that night, three hundred fires had been recorded, and forty were still blazing, involving over ten thousand Detroiters and one thousand police. There were reports of sniper fire aimed at firefighters. Just after midnight on the following day, the first reported death occurred—a white male looter was shot by a white store owner. A few hours later, a guardsman shot a white male coming down from a roof, believing him to be a sniper. As the night wore on, Governor Romney and Mayor Cavanagh requested first state troopers, then National Guard troops, then federal troops. A series of political, legal, and strategic disagreements meant that the soldiers were not deployed for almost twenty-four hours.

By Monday evening, a running battle started between the police and snipers, pinning down the firefighters and allowing the fires to spread. By midnight, five police stations were under attack. On the third day, with the deployment of troops, the authorities seemed to be bringing the disturbance under control, but sniper fire continued again that evening. By day four, the battle was becoming increasingly intense with more and more reports of atrocities. This included the shocking Algiers Motel incident, where police killed three unarmed African Americans in their custody and assaulted and abused several more—the subject of Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial film Detroit. The murderers were indicted, but eventually went free—a pattern that would repeat in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America over and over again. By Thursday, concerns were growing about the welfare of trapped residents and their access to food and water; there was also evidence that out-of-towners were coming to the city, either to observe or to seek trouble: police identified the license plates of cars from Alabama, California, Illinois, Kentucky, New York, and Ohio. Occupants were typically armed white males primed for mayhem.

By Friday the disturbances were starting to peter out. While there were sporadic reports of incidents over the weekend, by Monday it was over. Forty-three people were dead, seven hundred injured, and property to the value of around $50 million had been destroyed.30 According to the testimony of many white witnesses, the black people on the streets expressed no particular hostility to white residents—their fight was predominantly with the police. Events did not unfold in a simple way along rigid racial lines, and many black Detroiters implored the military to act more aggressively toward looters, a good number of whom were white. But even if the disturbances became something of a free-for-all, it was nonetheless clear that police overreach and police brutality, along with a history of severely strained race relations in general, were at the root of the escalating protests. The uprising, however chaotic, was driven by a demand for change and for recognition of the civil rights of the black population—and at least in some ways, it can be said to have succeeded.

Media coverage often focuses on the destruction and theft of property to lament the lawlessness of such rebellions, but if those meant to enforce the law are themselves the problem, the status of “the law” becomes more complicated. Some activists have pointed out that vandalism and looting can also be understood as a symbolic attack on the very economic structures that create and maintain inequality. Albert Cleage Jr., for instance, an influential black writer, preacher, and activist from Detroit, speculated that “we live in a materialist society…. Perhaps those who loot and burn don’t have any real revolutionary philosophy, but they know one simple thing: tear up the white man’s property, and you hurt him where it hurts the most.”31

The mainstream U.S. press, unsurprisingly, had a different take. Here is a fairly representative account in Time magazine from August 4, 1967:

Here was the most sensational expression of an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a small but significant segment of America’s Negro minority. Typically enough, Detroit’s upheaval started with a routine police action. Seven weeks ago, in the Virginia Park section of the West Side, a “blind pig” (after-hours club) opened for business on Twelfth street, styling itself the “United Community League for Civic Action.” Along with the after-hours booze that it offered to minors, the “League” served up black-power harangues and curses against Whitey’s exploitation. It was at the blind pig, on a sleazy strip of pawnshops and bars, rats and pimps, junkies and gamblers, that the agony began.³²

The passage drips with contempt and mockery for the neighborhood and its people, associating black political action with underage drinking, “rats and pimps.” While acknowledging some history of oppression (“the wrongs and disabilities have, in fact, been significantly reduced”), most of the piece focuses on looting and arson rather than the abominable conditions and legitimate grievances that found a violent outlet during those five days.

One conflict that came to a head here was, as noted above, the tensions between different camps within the black communities, roughly represented by the strategies and convictions of Martin Luther King versus those of Malcolm X. Moderate black leaders, such as Hubert Locke, aide to Detroit’s police commissioner during the uprising, were torn between the desire to have their voice of protest heard and a desire to prevent power in the community falling into the hands of black revolutionaries.

Needless to say, this brief chapter cannot even begin to do justice to the complexity of the uprising, its many origins and aftermaths. It is fair to say, however, that the series of urban rebellions in the 1960s served notice to America with regard to the enormous tensions between black and white communities in the era of “the new Jim Crow,” to use Michelle Alexander’s well-considered term. The disparities had been long in the making, as Thomas Sugrue’s indispensable book The Origins of the Urban Crisis demonstrates.

A simple table in Sugrue’s book illustrates why Detroit has a special place in American race history.33 It lists a measure of “dissimilarity,” capturing the extent of segregation in sixteen of the largest northern U.S. cities for each decade between 1940 and 1990. Generally speaking, the typical northern city in 1940 had a dissimilarity index of 90 on a scale between zero (no segregation) and 100 (complete segregation). By 1990, in three-quarters of these cities this index fell to a range between 68 and 83, marking a significant (though hardly praiseworthy) rise in integration. For Detroit, the needle did not move in that half-century: it was stuck between 85 and 90 throughout. Detroit was segregated, stayed segregated, and remains segregated—not by law, but by persistent economic, political, cultural, and historical forces that have taken over the role of openly discriminatory policies.³⁴

Such was the history that no World Series triumph could erase it nor heal its deep wounds. For the span of one rowdy and joyous evening, it may have been out of mind at least, allowing a glimpse of what a unified city might be like. Perhaps that was what Willie Horton meant when he said, “I believe the ’68 Tigers were put here by God to heal this city.”³⁵ It was a good thing, to be sure, that the 1968 Tigers, largely unchanged from the previous year, were an integrated team, and wildly popular in the city. Willie Horton, the first black Tigers player to achieve stardom, was a Detroiter through and through, and a favorite in the stadium and the city.

By May 10, the team topped the league, and they never gave up the lead after that—by the end of September they were twelve games ahead of the field. The Tigers had bettered their season win percentage, to .636, which had been surpassed only three times before—in 1909, 1915, and 1934. Denny McLain in particular had a magical season, ending with an ERA of 1.96, which earned him the Cy Young and AL MVP award, all at the precocious age of twenty-four. In September, he won baseball fans’ hearts during a special game in which Mickey Mantle, in his farewell season, played for the last time at The Corner. McLain threw him a soft pitch so the legendary Mantle could record one final home run in Tiger Stadium. The entire stadium rose to its feet to applaud as the great man circled the bases, although the Commissioner of Baseball later threatened McLain with an investigation for “compromising the integrity of the game.”36

In the World Series, Detroit faced St. Louis, who had dominated the National League in similar fashion. 1968 had been the year of the pitcher; for St. Louis, Bob Gibson had been setting records with an extraordinary ERA of only 1.12, throwing thirteen shutouts along the way. In game 1, Gibson brought the Tigers down to earth by striking out 17 batters, a World Series record. The Cardinals won the game 4–0. In the second game, pitcher Mickey Lolich hit a home run for the Tigers (the only one of his career), and they won comfortably 8–1. The next three games were at Tiger Stadium. The first two went to St. Louis, with Gibson once again overpowering the Detroit batting lineup in game 4. Down 3–1, Detroit now had to sweep the final three games, a feat achieved only twice before in major league history. Game 4 started disastrously when Lolich gave up three runs in the first inning, but the Tigers clawed their way to victory, scoring two in the fourth and three in the seventh, with Lolich regaining control and not allowing St. Louis to score again.³⁷

The teams now returned to Busch Memorial Stadium for the last two games. In game 6, McLain gave up a single run while the Detroit batting went wild, scoring ten in the third inning, including a grand slam, while the Cardinals desperately tried to staunch the flow with three different pitchers. So it all came down to the last game, with Mickey Lolich facing Bob Gibson on October 10—surely St. Louis were still the favorite? After six innings, the scores were tied at zero. Then at the top of the seventh, with two men on, Curt Flood, one of the best fielders in the game, committed an error that yielded two runs to Detroit. An additional run in that inning more or less settled it. Both teams added one run in the ninth, and then the Detroit celebrations began.

Tiger Stadium features statues commemorating the exploits of five Hall of Famers: Ty Cobb, Hank Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer, Hal Newhouser, and Al Kaline. But there is a sixth statue: Willie Horton. He’s had an impressive career, but he will likely never make it into the Hall of Fame, which admits very few players each season. There are other reasons why Willie Horton enjoys monumental and monument-worthy status in the city. Born in Virginia in 1942, the youngest of fourteen children, his family moved to Detroit in 1947. He attended Northwestern High School in midtown, and grew up not far from Briggs Stadium, as it was then known. He hit his first home run there during a high school championship game, signed with the Tigers organization in 1961, and, after playing in the minors, made his debut in the majors in 1963.38

During the 1969 season, the pitcher of the Seattle Pilots, Jim Bouton, kept a no-holds-barred diary that exposed the seamy side of the game—the drinking, drug taking, gambling, and womanizing of the national pastime. Published in 1970, the book was an instant bestseller that also got Bouton ostracized by his peers. The entry for August 15 observes, “The situation of the Negro in baseball is not as equitable as it seems. He still has to be better than his white counterparts to do as well.” After telling a story about a player whose stats would have given him a shot at the majors, Bouton continues: “There are a lot of Negro stars in the game. There aren’t too many average Negro players. The obvious conclusion is that there is some kind of quota system. It stands to reason that if 19 of the top 30 hitters in the major leagues are black, as they were in 1968, then almost two thirds of all the hitters should be black. Obviously, it’s not that way. In the case of the Tigers the fact that only three of their players are black is no less astonishing.”³⁹

On the first Sunday of the 1967 uprising, the Tigers were playing a double-header against the Yankees. Most of the players had no idea what was happening while Mickey Lolich gave up the win in the first game and Willie Horton hit a home run to help win the second. During the game, smoke started to drift over left field, but the commentators had been told not to mention the uproar in the city, and once the second game was over, the players were ordered to go home—except for Lolich, a member of the National Guard, who was told to report for duty, and spent the next week in uniform patrolling the city with a rifle in his hand.

Willie Horton, however, did not go home, either. As the Detroit News reported years later:

The players had been urged to leave in a hurry, to head straight home, to stay far from the smoke and searing tempers that had turned a town into a cauldron.

Horton could do no such thing. He was a Detroit resident. He knew these neighborhoods. These people. These issues of poverty and justice that few could appreciate unless you, too, had been affected by the loss in only a few years of 156,000 manufacturing jobs, which later devolved into the flight of 246,000 jobs from a town that 10 and 20 years before had been a shrine to America’s might.

He, too, understood race’s ugly consequences, how they could bore into a man or woman, not daily, but hourly, moment to moment. Horton pulled his Ford to an intersection as thick with simmering people and surrounding cops as with black smoke that could be seen for miles.

“I got there, by myself, around 7 p.m.,” Horton remembers of that evening of July 23, 1967. “It was scaring me. There were people on all sides of me. It was like a war. But a war isn’t supposed to be in your community.

“I got on top of the hood of my car. I had my uniform on. I had my street clothes in a duffel bag.”

Everyone knew Horton. Everyone knew he needed to be elsewhere.

“Go home, Willie, we don’t want you to get hurt,” Horton remembers hearing, continually.

Horton’s car already had been scorched by fire in an area where fire, more than any sense of order or law, increasingly ruled.

“Don’t defeat this purpose!” Horton pleaded. “This isn’t about looting.”40

His words fell on deaf ears that night, but Horton, who played for the Tigers until 1977, became a symbol of peace and goodwill, and he devoted himself to the city. In 2004, the governor declared his birthday, October 18, to be Willie Horton Day in the state of Michigan.