THE SO-CALLED “KERCHEVAL incident” of August 9–10, 1966—sometimes referred to as a “miniriot” but downgraded by the media from a full-scale civil disturbance at the request of Mayor Jerome P. Cavanagh and the Detroit Police Department—began Tuesday at 8:25 p.m. when a routine arrest in front of a private residence aroused the wrath of bystanders, and ended twenty-four hours later when a cloudburst drenched the spirits of even the most stubborn protesters. Mother Nature’s intrusion was the last in a long line of fortunate coincidences—including the hour the trouble started, when the police force was at maximum strength, and the presence in the area of two squads of the Motor Traffic Bureau and both the first and second sections of the Tactical Mobile Unit—that enabled the police to restore order with a minimum of conflict.
The event has been called a dress rehearsal for the devastating riots that took place in the area of Twelfth Street during the week of July 23–29, 1967. A Sunday morning raid on a blind pig operated by the United Civil League for Community Action went wrong when customers attempted to prevent the police from leaving with their prisoners. Throughout the next seven days, the police engaged in running firefights with citizens on a street of flames. When local authorities proved incapable of containing the arsons, violence, and looting, Governor George Romney dispatched reinforcements from the Michigan National Guard and eventually requested emergency aid from President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who ordered tanks and paratroopers from the United States armed services into the area. When the insurrection had at last been put down, eighty million dollars in property had been destroyed and forty-three lives had been lost.
Mayor Cavanagh’s hopes for national office died soon after the riots. Defeated by former Governor G. Mennen Williams for the Democratic senatorial nomination, he announced his decision in June 1969 not to run for a third term as mayor. His death some years later received minimal attention in the national press. Similarly, George Romney’s dependency upon federal troops to quell a civil disturbance has been cited for his abysmal showing in the 1968 race for the Republican nomination for President. Detroit Police Commissioner Ray Girardin requested retirement in October 1967, explaining, “You’ve got to bleed some in a job like this, but, by God, I’ve been gushing.”
In 1973, the year the Arab oil embargo and the resulting energy crisis ended the brief reign of the gas-guzzling “muscle cars,” Detroit elected its first black mayor. Despite numerous federal and local investigations of alleged misconduct in his administration, Coleman A. Young remains in office as of this writing, the longest-serving mayor in Detroit’s history. Under his leadership the municipal government and its police agency have come to reflect the city’s predominately black population to a degree that would have been unthinkable in 1966.
Today, the biggest problem facing Detroit is not race but drugs, America’s most enduring legacy of the 1960s. The fight for supremacy in the numbers racket has been supplanted by drive-by shootings and crack-house massacres over millions of dollars in controlled and illegal substances. There have been other changes as well. The music of choice is Rap. Video arcades outnumber neighborhood movie houses, and those automobiles not manufactured in Japan are built with foreign steel and assembled in countries other than the United States. By law, they are all equipped with seat belts and other features designed exclusively for the safety of the people who ride in them.
And Twelfth Street is now known as Rosa Parks Boulevard.