People can cry much easier than they can change.
—James Baldwin1
In my travels in the North I was increasingly becoming disillusioned with the power structures there . . . [who] welcome[d] me to their cities and showered praise on the heroism of Southern Negroes. Yet when the issues were joined concerning local conditions only the language was polite; the rejection was firm and unequivocal.
—Martin Luther King Jr., November 19652
THE SUMMER OF 2017 marked fifty years since the Newark and Detroit uprisings. Scores of anniversary articles, podcasts, radio interviews, opeds, public events, and even a Hollywood movie reflected on Black life in these cities, on the uprisings and their causes, on what happened and how it changed life in these cities and the nation, and on enduring issues such as police brutality today. And while many thoughtfully excavated a larger history of systemic racial injustice and Black life in both cities, nearly all replicated a glaring erasure: leaving out the long history of activism in these cities before these uprisings. Perhaps the worst was Kathryn Bigelow’s film Detroit, written by Mark Boal, which focused on the police killings of three Black teenagers at the Algiers Motel early on the fourth morning of the Detroit uprising. The movie literally started with the police raid of the bar that touched off the riot, completely erasing the history of Black life and activism in the city before that night. In Bigelow and Boal’s Detroit, there was no Black community life in the city before the riot or well-established Black grievances, let alone a long-standing Black movement that repeatedly raised issues of police brutality, housing and school segregation, urban renewal, and job exclusion but had been disparaged and dismissed for years before the uprising.
Fifty years earlier, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Parks had pointedly criticized the willful disregard of movements and “resistance to change” in Los Angeles and Detroit in the years leading up to the uprisings in both cities. While both King and Parks are regularly invoked in discussions of racial politics today, their work in the North and particularly the way they framed the uprisings of the 1960s are hardly acknowledged. Both had pressed for change and joined with movements in these cities demanding housing and school desegregation, jobs and public assistance, and an end to police brutality for years before the uprisings—and were attacked for it. And both insisted that the story did not begin with the riots of the mid-1960s, as the media and political officials suggested, but with the long history of injustice and frustrated Black struggle in the North that preceded them.
In November 1965, King took to the pages of the Saturday Review to criticize the surprise evinced by California officials in the wake of the Watts riot three months earlier. Given widespread segregation and inequality in Los Angeles and a freedom movement long opposed and dismissed there, King found the shock dishonest; Northern city leaders like those in LA in the years before the uprising embraced his efforts in the South but were “firm” and “unequivocal” in rejecting local demands for change.3 By refusing to recognize the long history of Black struggle in the city challenging school and housing segregation, job exclusion, and police brutality and own up to the massive white resistance to it, Angelenos conveniently avoided their responsibility. While offering concern about civil rights in the South, they had maintained and defended systems of inequality at home that had created the conditions for the uprising. King found this double standard deeply troubling.
This willful blindness that King critiqued in the Saturday Review has been replicated in popular narratives and in many textbooks: as the story goes, a movement of courageous Southern Black people, with the help of liberal Northern whites, pushed the nation to confront the Jim Crow South and succeeded in passing two landmark laws, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. But just days after the signing of the VRA, Watts erupted. In this version, systemic racial injustice and a noble movement are located in the South. The Watts riot becomes the first introduction to the Northern racial landscape outside the South—and Black communities there are cast as angry, alienated, and unwilling to work through “proper channels.” The problems of Northern Blacks are treated as much more complicated—cultural as much as structural; Northern youth pictured as inherently rejecting nonviolence and organized struggle; and no civil rights movement depicted in these cities before the riots.
In this version, King’s work in and perspectives on the North are mistakenly understood to start only after these riots—a gross distortion of his actual political life, in which he had crisscrossed the North in the early 1960s to highlight not only Southern inequality but also Northern injustice. By 1960, King was publicly making clear “the racial issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem.”4 Throughout the early 1960s, he took part in rallies, meetings, and marches from Boston to Los Angeles highlighting the problems of school and housing segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality in those cities. In April 1965, in a speech to the Massachusetts legislature, King pointedly explained that “segregation, whether it is de jure segregation of certain sections of the South or de facto segregation of the North, is a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties.”5 And in the Saturday Review piece, King pointed out that most Northern white people who praised his efforts challenging segregation and racial injustice in the South resisted those efforts and his own work in their own backyards. But the media covered his criticisms of Northern racism very little—until after the riots, when it began soliciting King for his comments. In other words, King was highlighting Northern racial injustice long before the riots, but reporters often reported it as new after these uprisings.
Indeed, in the decade before 1965, Black Angelenos, like their counterparts in New York City, Boston, Detroit, Birmingham, and Montgomery, took to meeting rooms, mass gatherings, and the streets to protest the systemic racial inequality at the city’s core. They held regular demonstrations demanding desegregation and equity in Los Angeles’s public schools, protested widespread police brutality in the city, and fought racially exclusive housing developments and a segregationist 1964 state ballot initiative, Proposition 14, which sought to repeal the hard-won 1963 Rumford Fair Housing Act. King journeyed to the city a number of times to join with them. They were met with white intransigence around school inequality and segregation, an unwillingness to reform police practices, and the decisive victory of Proposition 14 in November 1964, which returned to Californians their right to discriminate in the sale and rental of their property.
Focusing on that decade of struggle before the uprising reveals that in the face of mounting Black protests, white leaders and citizens developed a variety of mechanisms to ignore them: diminishing the problem, refusing to listen, reshaping the problem, asking for proof, demonizing activists as “troublemakers,” blaming Black culture as the problem, and refusing to even acknowledge incidences of police abuse. Surprise following the uprisings in both Watts and Detroit became the ultimate way to ignore the long-standing nature of these grievances. Reckoning with the history of Black organizing before the uprisings in those cities upends our popular narrative of the era and forces us to confront the years of white disregard and opposition to Black demands for justice that laid the groundwork for these rebellions of the mid-1960s. It requires us to see movements in each of these cities that were long ignored, often because many city leaders and white citizens saw themselves as open and progressive.
Los Angeles’s commitment to segregation was deep-seated. “Los Angeles hurt me racially as much as any city I have ever known,” novelist Chester Himes observed. “Black people were treated much the same as they were in any industrial city of the South. . . . The difference was the white people of Los Angeles seemed to be saying, ‘Nigger, ain’t we good to you?’”6 Indeed, Marnesba Tackett, who migrated to Los Angeles in 1952 and soon became a leading civil rights activist, “found . . . very little better than what I found in the South.”7 In the early 1950s, Tackett led the Los Angeles NAACP’s Education Committee, which began attacking school segregation, the lack of Black teachers, and the presence of racial stereotypes in the city’s school curriculum.8 The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board of Education vehemently denied the charges, claiming that it maintained a color-blind policy that kept no records of the racial distribution of students or teachers. As in Boston, in Los Angeles the need to prove the existence of segregation would be a persistent challenge for civil rights groups such as the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who demanded on countless occasions that LAUSD administer a racial census to document the obviously segregated nature of its schools. The board resisted calls for a school census until it was forced by the state to conduct one in 1966, claiming Black parents would object to inscribing race on individual student records. Subsequent access to school records in a later desegregation lawsuit, according to white ACLU activist and UCLA professor John Caughey, showed that the board of education (BOE) had been “reliably informed about where Blacks were” and thus had purposely “misrepresented its own knowledge of school segregation in LAUSD.”9 Similar to what occurred in New York and Boston, in Los Angeles, there were white community activists who joined the struggle for racial equality in the city, who also consistently pointed out the state-sponsored nature of the city’s segregation and were consistently ignored and in some cases red-baited for their criticisms.
The 1960 US Census revealed Los Angeles was more segregated than any city in the South, and the California Eagle reported, “more Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock.”10 School segregation worsened in Los Angeles, as it did in many Northern and Western cities, after the Brown decision. As Black migration to the city increased, the board kept readjusting zoning lines to keep Black students ensconced in increasingly overcrowded Black schools. Many were forced to have double-session days, a policy LAUSD pursued in Black schools to accommodate increasing numbers of students, while a great number of seats went empty in other parts of the city. Teachers and administrators often called Black students “monkeys,” “thugs,” and “tramps.”11 Textbooks were old and often contained “happy slave tales” and other demeaning portrayals of Black people in history and literature.12
Patterns of school segregation did not derive simply from racialized housing patterns, as school officials liked to claim. Rather they resulted from these officials’ own actions gerrymandering school zoning lines, restricting the hiring of Black and Chicano teachers, apportioning school resources unequally, tracking Black and Chicano students into vocational rather than college programs, and providing few college-preparation classes in Black and Chicano schools.
By 1961, the Southern California ACLU, NAACP, and CORE all were highlighting the dramatic overcrowding plaguing many Black and Latino schools and pressing school officials to address pervasive school segregation in the city. That year, King made the first of many trips to the city to speak to a Los Angeles freedom rally. More than twenty-eight thousand people heard King highlight the issues facing African Americans in the city and draw connections between Southern struggles and the Los Angeles movement. Shortly after getting out of a Birmingham jail in May 1963, King returned to Los Angeles and spoke to crowd of more than thirty-five thousand people at Wrigley Field. “You asked me what Los Angeles can do to help us in Birmingham,” he told the audience. “The most important thing that you can do is to set Los Angeles free because you have segregation and discrimination here, and police brutality.”13
The turnout at these events and the tenor of the coverage in local Black newspapers indicate that African Americans in Los Angeles viewed themselves as part of a national freedom movement. While the fable paints King as out of touch with racial issues in the North and West before Watts erupted, his repeated appearances in the early 1960s decrying education inequity, housing segregation, and police injustice in Los Angeles reveal this as a dangerous, if convenient, distortion.
As for local civil rights leaders, the NAACP’s Marnesba Tackett critiqued the idea that Black people in Los Angeles largely viewed the civil rights movement from afar.
Of course, Los Angeles was very sympathetic toward what was going on in the South . . . [but] my priority was in trying to get equal education right here in Los Angeles, where we had a lot of discrimination, a lot of work done in terms of the way boundaries were drawn. . . . It all needed to be worked on at one and the same time.14
Inspired by King’s visit to create a united front movement in Los Angeles, seventy-six community and political groups formed the United Civil Rights Council in June 1963. Tackett was unanimously selected as the UCRC’s education chair.15 Attacking the BOE’s claim of color blindness, she compared Los Angeles schools to “those of Alabama and Mississippi.”16 The UCRC drew up a list of demands, calling on the board to redraw district lines, transfer Black students out of overcrowded schools, diversify the curriculum, and change the teacher-hiring process to increase the number of nonwhite teachers and distribute them throughout the entire district. But the board did nothing, preferring to study the issue.
Most board members publicly asserted that the city’s schools were not segregated. They blamed nonwhite families for “negative attitudes toward education,” regularly referred to majority-Black schools as “culturally-disadvantaged schools,” and “resent[ed] pressure put on the board. . . . We represent majorities.” Instead of desegregation, Los Angeles school officials proposed increased funding to “culturally disadvantaged” schools, including money for new programs aimed at addressing “juvenile delinquency” and reducing dropout rates, and blamed “the lack of hope and motivation among some of these families which leads them into negative attitudes toward education and the demands the school makes on their children.”17
In response, the UCRC began holding marches downtown throughout the summer of 1963, and held sit-ins, sleep-ins, and study-ins in the fall. Purposely echoing King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a group of the city’s Black leaders issued a critical statement in June 1963: “All deliberate speed has meant no speed at all. The spirit of Birmingham means integration now in every way.”18 Hundreds of student protesters marched; they lined the halls of the BOE building with a study-in, and disrupted a meeting with a sing-in in the fall. But the board remained intransigent. Writer James Baldwin, at a 1963 press conference, took Los Angeles’s leadership to task: “I doubt that a single Negro in Los Angeles would agree that conditions are improving. . . . The real Negro leaders have been trying to speak to you for years. . . . You won’t listen.”19
Such confrontational tactics were not popular in a city proud of its liberalism. In November, national director of CORE James Farmer was barred from speaking at the University of Southern California because the dean deemed him “too controversial.”20 That same month, CORE launched “Operation Jericho,” a door-to-door campaign in the Watts neighborhood to counter petition campaigns by adjacent white South Gate residents to prevent school desegregation. Many Black students lived closer to South Gate High School than Jordan High School, and “the education at South Gate was so much better,” Tackett explained at the time. “We noticed the school board kept expanding Jordan’s boundary as more black children moved in instead of sending them to South Gate.”21 At the end of the month, the board acquiesced to South Gate parents and refused to redraw the school boundary between South Gate and Watts, making available a meager thirty-four high school transfer spots for Black students to attend South Gate and Huntington High Schools—a move the California Eagle termed a “fraud of the worst kind.”22
The city remained intractable as well on the issue of police brutality. In 1961, the NAACP brought a tabulation of incidences of police brutality in the city to the Los Angeles Police Commission.23 Nothing was done. On April 27, 1962, Los Angeles police killed the twenty-nine-year-old unarmed secretary of the local Nation of Islam (NOI), Ronald Stokes, and wounded six others outside Muslim Temple 27. None of the seven men were armed. The fracas began when officers stopped two men, claiming they were suspicious because they were loading clothes into their car and there had been burglaries nearby. Stokes was shot at close range with his hands up. Police arrested seventeen members of the NOI, including those wounded, and blamed them for the trouble.24 Yet despite an autopsy that established that Stokes was shot at close range and had been stomped, kicked, and bludgeoned while dead or dying, the public inquest into his death found that the police shooting was “justified” in “self-defense.”25
Making an emergency trip to Los Angeles to hold city authorities accountable for Stokes’s death, Malcolm X joined NOI members, Christian ministers, Black politicians, the NAACP, and thousands of Angelenos to work toward creating a united front movement against police brutality in the city.26 Three thousand people packed a joint mass meeting at Second Avenue Baptist Church with Malcolm X, NAACP leaders, the Reverend Maurice Dawkins, Cyril Briggs, and Mervyn Dymally. National NAACP head Roy Wilkins called attention to the city’s “long reputation” under Chief William Parker for police brutality.27 Loren Miller, who owned the California Eagle, and Earl Broady provided legal assistance for the fourteen NOI members, and Celes King of the NAACP provided $160,000 for their bail. Working with local activists, Malcolm X accused the LAPD of “Gestapo like tactics and false propaganda.” He also began reaching out to African leaders on the matter of US police brutality and many, including Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, condemned Stokes’s murder. The lack of justice in the Stokes case spurred Malcolm X, in conversation with New York lawyer Paul Zuber, to pursue the idea of filing a petition to the United Nations protesting police brutality.28
When Nation of Islam head Elijah Muhammad called Malcolm X out of Los Angeles, local activists continued pressing forward, documenting a widespread pattern of police abuse in the city and calling for Chief Parker’s resignation. Parker had become chief in 1950 and gained a national reputation for professionalizing the Los Angeles Police Department. Locally, however, he was known for amplifying an us-versus-them police culture and for a pattern of police brutality and harassment of Black Angelenos. His attitude toward the city’s Black community was stark: “They came in and flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them. . . . We didn’t ask these people to come here.”29
In response to rising Black complaints of police misconduct, Mayor Sam Yorty criticized the NAACP for “bringing about the very condition they are complaining about.” He asked for federal help around the “unrest” and created a blue ribbon committee to look into the issue.30 Little change in police practices resulted. Local NAACP head Christopher Taylor blasted the committee’s report: “We’re right back where we started from. . . . They’ve ignored all complaints of the community and now they can keep on doing the same thing.”31 When Malcolm X returned to Los Angeles in 1964, he again condemned the ongoing pattern of police brutality in the city. Thus, Black grievances against the police were amply highlighted for years before the uprising.
In 1964, the burgeoning Black freedom movement in Los Angeles had to shift its organizational energies in an effort to defeat a menacing ballot initiative. Proposition 14 sought to repeal the new Rumford Housing Act, which banned racial discrimination in the sale and rental of property—a law activists had fought for years to achieve. Supporters of Proposition 14 explicitly denied any racial animus but asserted their property rights and claimed the 1963 act, by mandating antidiscrimination, denied them equal protection under the law. The proposition’s confusing language would provide a template for citizen movements seeking to maintain segregation by asserting the right to private property and freedom from government intrusion: “Neither the state nor any subdivision or agency thereof shall . . . limit or abridge . . . the right of any person . . . to decline to sell, lease, or rent property to such . . . persons as he, in his absolute discretion, chooses.”
The NAACP, UCRC, and CORE, along with student groups from a number of LA colleges, conducted voter registration workshops, called for a boycott of the Southwest Realty Board for backing the initiative, and worked to pressure Governor Edmund Brown to oppose the ballot initiative. The Japanese American Citizens League and the Mexican American Political Association joined the fight, as did Martin Luther King Jr., who came to Los Angeles multiple times to campaign against Proposition 14, saying its passage would be “one of the most shameful developments in our nation’s history.”32 Many white Angelenos labeled him a Communist for this work, picketing the SCLC’s western office with signs reading “King Has Hate, Does Travel” and “Thank God for Chief Parker.”33
Supporters of Proposition 14 drew on “culture of poverty” images to justify patterns of racial inequality in the city. LA County Young Republicans president Robert Gaston claimed, “Negroes are not accepted [in white neighborhoods] because they haven’t made themselves acceptable.”34 Calling the 1963 Fair Housing Act “the Forced Housing Act,” supporters raised contrasting images of happy, suburban Anglo families and dysfunctional, deviant families of color. In November, California became the first to “take away gains Negroes had won,” as King put it, when 75 percent of white Californians “voted for ghettos.”35 The proposition passed by a two-to-one margin, even as Californians voted by similar margin to return Lyndon Johnson to the White House.36 The message from the majority of white voters was stark: civil rights were good, as long as they didn’t come home to California.
Los Angeles branch NAACP vice president Celes King observed the irony of Proposition 14’s passage and the lack of change in Los Angeles, despite its sunny reputation: “[With] the models in the other part of the country where they appeared to be making progress, here in Los Angeles we were supposed to be the satisfied blacks. Well, [we] really weren’t satisfied.”37 Nine months later, on August 11, 1965, a California Highway Patrol officer pulled over twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye for drunk driving. Frye had moved to Los Angeles at the age of thirteen and struggled with the city’s segregated schools: “When we came to Los Angeles, we got into an all-Negro school. . . . I made ‘A’s and ‘B’s back in Wyoming but here I began getting suspended for fighting.”38 Frye subsequently dropped out of high school.
When another police officer began hitting Frye and his mother, who had arrived on the scene, onlookers started throwing stones and bottles at the officers, and the unrest escalated to the looting and burning of buildings. In response, the police cracked down on the Black community at large. The city curfew only covered Black LA—an area the media began calling “Watts,” although it covered the neighborhoods of Watts, Central, Avalon, Florence, Green Meadow, Exposition, and Willowbrook. That this swatch of 250,000 residents could be effectively cordoned off from the rest of the city is a testament to the degree of segregation in LA. At the end of seven days, thirty-four people had died and hundreds more were injured, many at the hands of the local police or the California National Guard.
Many public officials and local residents were “shocked” by the Watts riot, as it came to be called. Proclaiming California as a “state without racial discrimination,” Governor Brown flew home immediately, informing reporters that “nobody told me there was an explosive situation in Los Angeles.”39 It was a willful, comforting shock. Even though the Los Angeles Times had covered many of the protests of the past decade, reporters and editors refused to call city leaders to account for their long deafness to Black grievances and instead helped legitimate this frame of surprise. As King made clear a few months later in the Saturday Review, this frame of surprise conveniently erased the multitude of organizations that had long highlighted and challenged racial injustice in the city, and his own efforts to draw attention to inequality and police injustice in Los Angeles and across the North. (The year before, following the 1964 Harlem uprising, King had similarly called for a civilian-complaint review board to monitor the New York Police Department—and been roundly criticized by city leaders.)40
The “surprise” also obscured the role many in the city had played in dismissing Black protest and maintaining inequality. By erasing this long history of struggle, many Angelenos could conveniently evade responsibility for maintaining these systems of inequality and creating the conditions for the uprising.
The anger and frustration that burst forth during the uprising demonstrated the expectation and resulting frustration that had grown within Los Angeles’s African American community. NAACP chapter vice president Celes King, a bail bondsman, risked his business to post bond for hundreds of people, eliminating the standards usually used to agree to post for someone. That the vice president of the city’s NAACP was willing to affiliate his economic future to protect the rights of those arrested is telling: “The community was, I would say, generally supportive of the blacks that were the so-called rioters.”41
The uprising was more targeted than public officials suggested. Aimed at commercial interests (such as banks that charged Black people high rates, and grocery stores that marked up prices and sold rotten food), most housing was untouched, as were many Black businesses, Simon Rodia’s artistic Watts Tower, and the Urban League’s Watts project.42 The Los Angeles Riot Study, conducted by UCLA, on Black attitudes about the riot found that 58 percent of the Black people surveyed felt that favorable results would follow the riot, 62 percent considered the riot a Negro protest, and 64 percent thought the attack was deserved.43 This is not to say that every Black Angeleno saw the riots as a form of protest (a significant minority of the Black community clearly did not), nor that those who did linked it directly to the long-ignored activism of the previous decade. But understanding how nearly two-thirds of Black Angelenos surveyed saw the riots as “deserved” necessitates seeing both the inequities in the city and the long history of struggle to address these problems by other means.
Nearly incessantly at first, and for years following the uprising, journalists repeatedly asked King about Watts, giving him much more room to expound on these issues than they ever had before 1965. King critiqued the frame of shock but at other times went along with it, because it provided him space to talk about interlocking issues of race and class oppression that he’d been trying to emphasize for years. As Black bookstore owner Alfred Ligon explained, “It was only because of the [Watts] uprising that they became interested in the blacks.”44
While many city and state officials, along with the media, blamed Black culture and underclass alienation to explain what had produced the uprising, a mountain of evidence from the research, testimony, and investigation that followed the uprising, including that of the McCone Commission convened to investigate it, made the case that the “riots” were political rebellions against racism in the city and nation. The social profile of the “rioters” culled from the arrest data indicates that they had better than average educations, and that they were employed, socially conscious, and aware of international news. But researchers for both the McCone Commission and the Kerner Commission (convened after the uprisings in Detroit and Newark in 1967) were disciplined when they tried to put forth this more political thesis.45
Both Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks had a similar criticism of the reactions of many Detroiters and public officials to the 1967 Detroit uprising. For years, Black people in Detroit had highlighted and challenged Motown’s injustices: deep housing and school segregation, job discrimination, and patterns of police harassment and brutality.
On June 20, 1963, four years before the uprising, nearly two hundred thousand Black people marched through Detroit highlighting pervasive inequality in the city and the unwillingness of city leaders to recognize Black grievances and address segregated schools, housing, or job exclusion. March co-organizer Reverend C. L. Franklin explained to the Detroit News that the march would serve as a “warning to the city that what has transpired in the past is no longer acceptable to the Negro community.”46 Active in union and open housing movements in the city, Rosa Parks appeared at the front of Detroit’s Great March alongside Franklin, the Reverend Al Cleage Jr., and Martin Luther King Jr.
The Parks family had been forced to leave Montgomery in 1957, still unable to find work and facing death threats after the boycott’s successful end eight months earlier. They moved to Detroit, where her brother and cousins lived. Parks described Detroit as the “Northern promised land that wasn’t.”47 While a number of the public displays of segregation on buses, at drinking fountains, and on elevators were thankfully gone, she didn’t find “too much difference” in race relations between Montgomery and Detroit and the systems of school segregation, housing segregation, job discrimination, and police brutality in both cities.48 For years after they arrived, both Rosa and husband Raymond Parks had tremendous difficulty finding either steady work or decent housing, their experience paralleling those of many other Black people in the city. And like she had in Montgomery, she would spend the next four decades fighting the racism of Jim Crow Detroit.
Finally in 1961, the Parkses secured a ground-floor flat in the Virginia Park neighborhood along Detroit’s Twelfth Street corridor—“the heart of the ghetto,” as she described it. By the 1960s, twice as many people would be crowded into the Twelfth Street corridor, as these neighborhoods shifted from about 95 percent white in 1940 to 95 percent Black in 1960.49 Like the Parkses, many Black people couldn’t afford their own places. Decent housing for Black people to rent or buy was in desperately short supply. During the 1960s, the city began using urban renewal to clear Black neighborhoods to make room for development, gobbling up many Black homes and neighborhoods in the process. Forty-three thousand Detroiters were displaced by urban renewal—70 percent of them Black. Activists began calling it “Negro Removal.”50 Detroit’s liberal mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, had brought in $38 million in federal funds for urban renewal.51
After years of trying to draw attention to issues relating to jobs, schools, housing, and city planning, the 1963 march was organized as a way to disrupt the indifference of most white Detroiters to the inequalities and injustices that shaped Black life in the city. The numbers of marchers rivaled those at the March on Washington in DC two months later. Labor activist General Baker remembered the Great March’s massiveness: “We didn’t have to walk but were pushed up Jefferson.”52 The size signaled a growing impatience with the lack of change in the Motor City. After King spoke, Reverend Cleage took to the stage at Cobo Hall, highlighting the landscape of local inequality and urging Detroiters to boycott A&P supermarkets until the company agreed to hire Black managers.53
Thirteen days after Detroit’s Great March, a police officer killed a young Black woman, Cynthia Scott. Cutting an impressive figure at six foot four and 198 pounds, “Saint Cynthia,” as she was known, a sex worker, was shot twice in the back and once in the stomach by police officer Theodore Spicher. Three days later, the prosecutor ruled that Spicher shot the “fleeing suspect” in self-defense and no charges would be filed. While the police claimed that Scott had pulled out a knife, an acquaintance who was with her said that she didn’t have a weapon; rather, the police had been harassing her, and when she walked away from them after telling them they had no grounds to arrest her, they shot her.
Five thousand people demonstrated outside police headquarters, yelling “Stop killer cops!” and threatening to storm the building.54 Petitions were circulated to recall the prosecutor, and the Detroit NAACP demanded a full investigation.55 Hundreds of people continued picketing and sitting-in at police headquarters. Richard Henry, whose brother Milton served as the lawyer on Scott’s case, and Al Cleage helped organize a picket line outside police headquarters a week later. Cleage’s Christian militancy would be a key driving force in Detroit’s growing freedom movement. Growing up in Detroit, Cleage attended Wayne State University and Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, in Ohio. Returning to Detroit in 1954, he formed his own congregation, Central Congregational, later renamed Central United Church of Christ. In 1957, the church purchased a building on Twelfth Street. In the early 1960s, Cleage joined with Richard and Milton Henry to build the Group on Advanced Leadership, an all-Black organization, “because something more needed to be done about police brutality, Negro removal disguised as urban renewal, Negro-hating textbooks, and the lack of black business.”56
Scott’s case became a touchstone for young activists in Detroit and led to the emergence of the Black political party, the Freedom Now Party. Henry Cleage, Al Cleage’s brother, ran for Wayne County prosecutor in 1964 on the Freedom Now ticket, promising if elected to reopen the case.57 As Al Cleage wrote in the Illustrated News (the bimonthly newspaper he founded in 1961 that developed a circulation of more than 35,000), “All Negroes are not automatically suspicious because of the fact that they are Negroes. . . . No grounds were given for the arrest for Cynthia Scott. Her arrest was therefore illegal and she had the right to walk away. An officer who kills a citizen who refuses to submit to an illegal arrest is guilty of murder and must be brought to trial!”58 Young activists sat-in at the mayor’s office, calling for a Black chief of police to be appointed.59
Public schools, urban renewal, housing, policing, jobs—these were the issues that animated Detroit’s freedom struggle. Critical of the racial blinders of Detroit’s liberalism, Cleage split from some other Black leaders to oppose a tax increase for schools, on the grounds that school segregation meant that Black people would pay more but Black children would get less. In November 1963, Black leaders held a meeting to create a Northern Christian Leadership Conference, but when they refused to let Cleage invite Malcolm X, he broke away and spearheaded his own parallel conference, the Grassroots Leadership Conference with Malcolm X as the keynote.
Since the late 1940s, Black people and the Detroit NAACP had brought a pattern of police harassment and brutality to the city’s attention. But these injustices were repeatedly denied and swept under the rug by city officals. In 1960, the Detroit NAACP lambasted the “chronic” nature of the problem and presented its own records of 244 cases of police brutality between 1955 and 1960, with 47 resulting in hospitalization.60 In 1964, NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins sounded the alarm that police relations in Detroit had worsened drastically.61 In 1965, people marched to protest five police killings in two years—Cynthia Scott, Kenneth Evans, Clifton Allen, Nathaniel Williams, and Arthur Barrington—and the brutal beatings of six others.62
On top of outright brutality, police officers regularly took money and other items of value from Black people they stopped. Any note of protest could lead to a beating, according to Detroit NAACP leader Arthur Johnson, and a trumped-up charge of drunkenness, disorderly conduct, or resisting arrest.63 Police expanded the practice of arresting Black people simply on “investigation”; about a third of their arrests were made for this reason.64 And they gave scores of tickets to increase revenue. “There’s a certain time of month . . . that you can’t hardly drive around the block. They follow you around just waiting for you to do something wrong,” one young man explained.65 Following the Watts uprising, Detroit police grew more aggressive, using new federal money to create a Tactical Mobile Unit for “crowd control” that Black Detroiters found to be “Gestapo-like.”66
Again and again, Black Detroiters raised these injustices, but Detroit’s leadership repeatedly ignored them. Detroit’s Black newspapers, the Michigan Chronicle and Cleage’s Illustrated News, recorded a steady stream of police abuse and harassment of Black Detroiters, but according to Johnson, the city’s major newspapers, the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, “had a standing agreement not to cover issues of police brutality.”67
Despite local calls, protests, rallies, and walkouts for concrete action to remedy Detroit’s segregated schools and housing, reform police practice, and open up job possibilities, little changed.68 Yet many whites in the city, including the city’s white political leadership, believed Detroit the apex of racial progress, with two Black congressmen, a strong NAACP, a liberal mayor, and a prosperous auto industry that appeared to offer Black and white workers economic opportunity. In 1966, Look magazine and the National Civic League named Detroit an “All-America City.”69
But such sunny pronouncements masked an unjust reality. Beginning August 9, 1966, a three-day mini-uprising erupted on Detroit’s eastside on Kercheval Avenue following harassment by a specialized police unit known as the “Big Four” (four white plainclothes police officers who moved through the city and were known for intimidating Black people) and the quick arrival of the Tactical Mobile Unit.70 Saying it had been building up for ten years, one young man explained their frustration with how police treated Black Detroiters. “If you’re just standing on the street, no matter how long, they run you off. If you’re in your car, they tell you to move on. If you drag your eyes, you’re wrong.”71 But city leadership downplayed the episode and continued to celebrate the city’s racial openness.
The 1967 uprising began following a massive police reaction when patrons refused to disperse after police tried to shut down an after-hours bar. People had gathered that night to celebrate the safe return of two men from Vietnam. Because many Detroit establishments refused to serve Black people, and many Black business owners had difficulty securing the paperwork and capital for an official establishment, after-hours bars, or “blind pigs” as they were called, represented a crucial space for Black community leisure. Police raids on these bars had been, according to a Department of Justice report, a “chief source of complaint” before the uprising—and that night would be the third time this particular establishment would be raided in less than two years. In the early morning hours, police began arresting people at the blind pig at 9125 Twelfth Street (Detroit’s Twelfth Street corridor served as a hub of working-class Black leisure). The crowd grew larger and more angry as morning dawned and the day went on. The police grew more violent and forceful, as well. At the peak of the unrest, the uprising encompassed fourteen square miles. The governor requested federal help, and 2,700 army paratroopers descended on the city. Law enforcement was given wide latitude to “subdue” the uprising by any means necessary.
“What really went on was a police riot,” Congressman John Conyers would later observe.72 In certain neighborhoods, police shot out the streetlights, causing further chaos. The only Black bookstore in Detroit, Vaughn’s Bookstore—a frequent gathering place for young activists—was intentionally destroyed by police, witnesses reported. Police firebombed the building, mutilated the artwork, damaged many photographs, and left the water running, ruining the vast majority of books.73 Police arrested over seven thousand people during the uprising, but most of these arrests were ultimately shown to be baseless. In perhaps the most egregious event, police killed three young men at the Algiers Motel; while the officers claimed self-defense, no weapons were ever found and witnesses said the young men were deliberately murdered. At the end of five days, forty-three people were dead—thirty at the hands of the police—and property damage was estimated at $45 million, with 412 buildings completely burned.
The abusive policing that took place during the uprising was supported by prosecutors and the courts. Wayne County prosecutor William Cahalan not only supported police tactics but insisted on high bail to keep people “off the streets.”74 As historian Say Burgin documents, judges “ran roughshod over defendants’ Eighth Amendment rights—at the explicit request of Wayne County prosecutor William Cahalan—by routinely denying counsel, setting impossibly high bails (often for whole groups of people at once), and bringing spurious charges for which there was little to no evidence.”75 Ultimately, according to the Kerner Commission, 24 percent of those arrested for felonies were never prosecuted, and half of those prosecuted were dismissed at preliminary examination for lack of evidence.76 By spring of 1968, with half the 3,200 looting cases cleared, 60 percent had resulted in dismissal and only two had resulted in convictions on the original charge.77
Understanding that these maneuvers were aimed at keeping Black and poor people “off of the streets,” newly elected Recorder’s Court judge George Crockett was sickened by the ways in which the judiciary acted as an extension of the police and the mayor’s office during the uprising. Crockett, who had served as a criminal defense lawyer and vice president of the National Lawyers Guild, represented Communists accused under the Smith Act before deciding to run for Detroit’s Recorder’s Court in 1966. He observed: “There is no equal justice for black people in our criminal courts today, and what’s more, there never has been. And this is the shame of our whole judicial system. . . . And this is so, not because the written law says it shall be so, rather it is so because our judges, by their rulings, make it so.”78 Crockett would use his powers as judge very differently than his colleagues and try to right the scales of justice, often freeing or giving lenient sentences to first-time offenders and for nonviolent offenses, and refusing to collude with prosecutors on how justice should proceed.
Rosa Parks, who lived a mile from where the uprising began and worked serving constituent needs in Congressman John Conyers’s Detroit office, sought to contextualize the Detroit uprising as “the result of resistance to change that was needed long beforehand.”79 Patterns of police harassment and brutality had been documented for years with no change in police practice. Parks thus located the uprising in the context of white resistance and deafness to Black grievances in Detroit: “The establishment of white people . . . will antagonize and provoke violence. When the young people want to present themselves as human beings and come into their own as men, there is always something to cut them down.”80 Bookstore owner Ed Vaughn echoed this in an interview with Black reporter Louis Lomax: “You told them; Martin Luther King told them; everybody who cares, white and black told them. They did not listen.”81 A few months later, in a talk before the American Psychological Association, King reframed the question of riots by highlighting the injustice and white illegality that produced the conditions in Northern cities: “When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services.”82
As King made clear, the police themselves were doing illegal and immoral things, as were landlords and city officials, often protected by the cloak of whiteness. Despite rampant police harassment and brutality during the uprising, a pattern of impunity followed—and it became clear that there would be no accountability for police misconduct. Following a speech by H. Rap Brown in Detroit, young militants took up the call for a “People’s Tribunal” to bring the evidence of what happened in front of the community and hold the police accountable for their actions during the riot, particularly the killings of the three young men—Carl Cooper (age seventeen), Aubrey Pollard (age nineteen), and Fred Temple (age eighteen)—at the Algiers Motel. Dan Aldridge, one of the organizers, said, “We wanted to bring out all the facts and the truth about what actually happened.” They asked the fifty-four-year-old Rosa Parks if she would be willing to serve on the jury. Believing that it was “better to protest than to accept injustice,” she agreed and joined their attempts to get justice—understanding the importance of the older generation in nurturing the spirit of resistance emerging with young people.83 Ed Vaughn, African American writer John Killens, and white activist Frank Joyce also served on the jury. Attorney Milton R. Henry served as prosecutor; Solomon A. Plapkin, a white attorney, and Central Church member Russell L. Brown Jr. acted as defense counsel. (The Detroit Bar Association considered disbarring the lawyers who participated.)
Organizers were forced to hold the tribunal in Reverend Cleage’s church (later known as the Shrine of the Black Madonna, for the eighteen-foot brown-skinned Madonna and Child that artist Glanton Dowdell painted and Cleage installed in the front of the sanctuary on Easter Sunday 1967) when the original site, the Dexter Theater—fearing police would attack the place—backed out. They kept the witnesses out of sight, fearing police retaliation.
On the evening of August 30, 1967, people began arriving early and the church was packed to the rafters—with the sidewalks overflowing as well. “The brothers and sisters don’t know what fear is any more,” Cleage wrote after in the Michigan Chronicle. “There is no way to put down on paper the sheer horror of the recital of events by witness after witness. . . . The packed auditorium became more quiet than a courtroom.”84 Hearing the evidence, the tribunal’s jury found the police guilty of all charges. According to Aldridge, the reaction was “joy. . . . Because they heard the truth.”
The last time Rosa Parks saw Martin Luther King was seven months later, in the elite Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Repeatedly interrupted, heckled, and called a traitor that night, King made a point of contextualizing the riot the year before:
I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. . . . But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots . . . without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. . . . [A] riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.85
In the years following these uprisings, California and Michigan became key sites in the development of Black Power. Groups such as the Black Panther Party, the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, and the Republic of New Afrika took the Black freedom struggle to new places in the later 1960s—foregrounding access to health care, affordable housing and liberatory education, the right to self-defense, the need both for reparations and fundamental economic transformation, and a changed relationship between law enforcement and the Black community. But the urge was to present this militancy as coming out of nowhere, rather than as having emerged from years of work, struggle, and reflection by local organizers, from reflection, and from the “resistance to change long before.” Seeing a protracted movement in these cities before the uprisings reveals how long and hard people fought to reveal and challenge these injustices—and the investments Northern political elites and many ordinary white citizens had in ignoring or dismissing those movements. Surprise and sadness, as Baldwin points out, were easier than changing.
A similar surprise has accompanied uprisings from Ferguson to Baltimore today—as has a similar refusal to grapple with long-standing Black demands and movements that preceded them. While recent uprisings in Ferguson, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Baltimore have prompted much important reporting on the nature of injustice in law enforcement, municipal policy, and the court system in these places, few stories have focused on the groups and organizers in these cities that have highlighted problems for years. Much like after the Watts and Detroit uprisings, journalists today have not forced city leaders and citizens to grapple with the reasons why these movements and the issues they amply highlighted for years have been neglected for so long.
Such silences are comfortable. As King and Parks pointed out fifty years ago, it is easier to cast people as unwilling to work through the proper channels than wrestle with the ways society didn’t listen and wouldn’t change, even when people did work through the proper channels. It is easier to cast protesters as reckless and dangerous than face the comfort and cruel convenience of those on the sidelines of injustice. And it is easier to frame the situation as unfortunate but outside of our control, rather than come to grips with the ways the country has maintained an unjust criminal justice system and the long-standing protest that preceded these moments.