On the second day of the murder hearing, as it happened, Mayor Cavanagh and a team of men from his administration appeared in Washington before the President’s Commission on Civil Disorders.
There was an air of sadness and weariness in the Detroit delegation. Before its riot Detroit had been one of our cities of hope, and Mayor Cavanagh had been widely praised as one of the most forward-looking urban leaders in the country. Now there were ashes in his mouth as he began his presentation with a long catalogue of the warnings to all America that he had been uttering for five years. He reviewed the history of race relations in Detroit, highlighting the race riot of 1943 and an incident in 1966 in the Kercheval district that might have flared into a mass disturbance but did not. The best he could manage was to relate Detroit’s great rebellion to a national condition.
“I think it should be emphasized from the beginning,” he said, “that both the incident last year in Detroit and this year’s tragedy are part of a national picture of deep discontent in American cities today.
“The explosion that ripped Detroit had many points of origin over a long, long period of time. It has its links with events of recent years in Washington, D.C.; in Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama; in Jackson, Mississippi; in Cambridge, Maryland; in Kansas City, Missouri; in the Watts district in Los Angeles; in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City; on the South Side in Chicago; and in the cotton fields of Louisiana and Texas. . . .
“There has been no discernible relationship between the location or degree of violence in these disorders to social or economic or governmental factors. If there was a pattern, it was a crazy quilt. It is clear from our experience that you cannot extinguish a single flame in a general fire. You must extinguish the entire fire, and damp down all the sparks and ignition points.
“The explosion in Detroit was one flame in a nationwide fire. A spark fell in Detroit, and an ignition took place. Newark seemed to set the sparks flying, but the elements of combustion were there for many, many years.
“Every city has its individual aspects—its strengths and its weaknesses. We thought we were in a stronger position in terms of human relations than many other cities. Every outside observer agreed that we were. And I believe we were. But the difference wasn’t deep or fundamental enough to forestall the catastrophe.”
After reviewing the specific short-range precautions his administration had taken “to forestall the catastrophe”—the Mayor’s Summer Task Force, an Early Warning System, summertime activities at 589 recreation centers, the full range of anti-poverty programs (“funded at levels well below recognized needs in the city”), and a package of summer programs and summer-employment efforts which were all delayed by funding difficulties—he mentioned, for the only time specifically in his report, the Detroit Police Department, and then it was merely to point with pride to its “battle-tested” riot-control plan, from which we have seen some quotations, and to wonder whether the summer’s labor troubles and the blue flu had affected police performance during the riot.
The Mayor then showed the commission some movies of the uprising, and after the lights went back on in the hearing room he said, “Look at the faces. You will see mostly young men. These young men are the fuse. For the most part they have no experience in real productive work. For the most part, they have no stake in the social arrangements of life. For the most part, they have no foreseeable future except among the hustlers and minor racketeers. For the most part, they are cynical, hostile, frustrated, and angry against a system they feel has included them out. At the same time, they are filled with the bravado of youth and a code of behavior which is hostile to authority.”
“When a substantial number of people in a community come to feel that law and order is their enemy and their oppressor, that community is in danger. Such groups exist in most of our communities today.”
“As for those,” the Mayor said later on, “who feel that the total answer to the situation—to the dangers whose manifestations we have seen—is simply more guns, clubs, and force, they are wrong, catastrophically wrong.
“Of course, the increased availability and more effective use of peace-keeping forces is vital and essential.
“But those who cherish the thought that the situation, nationwide, can be dealt with simply by sterner measures of force and repression are deluding themselves.
“Repression without channels of release is a Molotov cocktail. It takes only one match to set it off, and then its destructive effects can spread everywhere.”
One must trust that the Mayor believed what he said, yet when, after many, many more words, he came to proposals for solutions, the very first of seventeen major recommendations was this:
“1. To restore law and order we must modernize our techniques for dealing with mob action, adopt the latest scientific devices, revamp our plans for dealing with civil disorder by planning for a more effective and fluid governmental response. I have requested planning assistance from the Secretary of the Army (letter attached) and support federal legislation which will grant aid directly to the cities in training, equipping, and paying police officers. There is the need for a federal riot police force to be located in our major cities and to be a part of the local police. I have asked Governor Romney to consider the formation of National Guard Riot Battalions located in the metropolitan areas to provide skilled and speedy response to civil disorders.”
I do not mean to suggest by this ironic juxtaposition that our cities should abandon the principle that the business of life should be transacted in a setting of law and order. The point here is that the city of Detroit, in its presentation to the commission, failed to ask such questions as these:
In what relationship does the need for law and order stand to other pressing needs in our society? Or, to put it another way, whence stems widespread consent to law and order?
What kind of law and order must we have?
Is the law equally applied to all citizens?
Should law be used to support or to retard obviously needed changes in the fabric of society?
As things actually go in our cities and states, are not the performances of the agencies that enforce the law and keep the order—namely, the police, the irregular military, and the courts—heavily stacked against all who happen not to be white?
Is there time for gradual reform?
Do we not need—does not the Algiers Motel incident help us to see that we need—an urgent and thoroughgoing overhaul of our national system of policing and judging and penalizing, to the end that every United States citizen would truly be able to perceive law and order as benefits to himself?
Not in all the several hundred pages of the report of Detroit’s appearance before the commission, and not even in the sixty pages of tightly detailed summary of large and little occurrences in the uprising, entitled “Sequence of Events,” is there a single word about the killings at the Algiers.