In 1967 ghetto uprisings erupted throughout the country. The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders counted 164 disorders and 83 deaths in the first nine months of the year, capped by major outbreaks in Newark and Detroit in July. The Commission repeated the findings of many of its predecessors about the background of rioting, but it went beyond them in saying: “White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War I.” It also cited as causes “white terrorism against non-violent protest” and called the police agents of “white racism and white repression.” The Commission noted that the rioters were better educated than non-rioters, were unemployed or underemployed, were racially proud, extremely hostile to whites and middle-class blacks, and highly distrustful of the American political system.
The Detroit uprising, the largest of the year, began with a police raid on five “blind pigs,” drinking and gambling clubs originally set up during prohibition, at 3:45 on Sunday morning, July 23. Eighty-two people were hauled away in police cars, which were stoned by a crowd of onlookers. By morning the crowds had grown to thousands, and window smashing and looting began. When the police proved unable to control the outbreak, the National Guard and then federal paratroopers were called in. The inexperienced, frightened Guardsmen sprayed bullets wildly at real or imagined snipers. The police rounded up blacks and beat some of them to extract confessions. Many men were brought to police stations uninjured and were taken from them to hospitals, bleeding severely; one woman was forced to strip while police snapped pictures and molested her. Although there was sniping at police and firemen from rooftops, of the 27 who were arrested for sniping, 24 were dismissed. Forty-three persons were killed in the riot, thirty-three of them blacks. The police killed twenty or twenty-one, the National Guard perhaps as many as nine, and the rioters two or three. Arrests totaled 7,200.
The following interview with a young black who claimed to be one of those sniping at the police during the riot was written by Ray Rogers, the New York Post, July 29, 1967. See Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968); and on the Detroit situation, John Hersey: The Algiers Motel Incident (1968).
A teenage Negro who identified himself as one of the elusive Detroit snipers says “the war” will not be over until “they kill all of us.”
But, he insisted yesterday, his activities were not organized.
“When the thing broke out me and my main man [best friend] were out there helping. We threw some cocktails. But after a while we got tired of that so we decided to go home and get our pieces [guns],” he explained.
“We knew they were going to try and step on this thing before it got out of hand so we figured we would give them something to think about,” he giggled.
“Got One or Two”
“We had them —— cops so scared that first night they were shooting at one another. I know I got one or two of them, but I don’t think I killed them. I wish I had, the dirty ——.”
The young man explained that he went and got his “piece” after he and his buddy had looted a liquor store.
“We drank a little. And after a while—boom, just like that we decided to do some shootin’.”
Did he realize he could be killed?
“I’m not crazy—I’m not crazy to be killed. I’m just gettin’ even for what they did to us. Really. That’s where it’s at.
“Man, they killed Malcolm X just like that. So I’m gonna take a few of them with me. They may get me later on, but somebody else will take my place—just like that.”
He explained that he avoided the area patrolled by the airborne troops because of the intensity with which they returned fire.
“They got a lot of soul brothers in their outfit too and I’m not trying to waste my own kind. I am after them honkies …” he said.
His mother had died years ago leaving him and his sister in a dilapidated apartment, he said.
“Man, that place was so bad that I hated to come home at night. My sister became a hustler for a guy I grew up with.” He said he had heard that she had been shot Wednesday night while looting a store.
“That makes me mad. Why they have to shoot somebody for takin’ something out of a store during a riot? These white mothers are something else,” he said angrily as he rubbed his long, powerful fingers together.
He said he wished he had a better weapon than the U.S. M-i-automatic carbine because it lacked range and fire power. Thus he could not fire more than one or two rounds at most before National Guardsmen laid down a heavy barrage.
“But I know I got two of them. I saw them mothers fall.
“One was a honky-tonk cop with a big belly and he couldn’t run too fast. And when I hit him he hollered and hit the pavement.
“And them stupid mothers fired all over the place except the place where I was—I was laying among some bricks in a burnt-out store. It was beautiful, baby, so beautiful I almost cried with joy.”
He said he never carried the carbine with him and he hid it in a different place after each time he used it.
He laughed and said:
“Twice they had their hands on me and searched me but they let me go. That’s why I say that the war ain’t over until they put all of us in jail or kill us.… I mean all of us soul brothers. But they can’t do that because there’s too many of us.”
Suddenly he began talking about his early life.
“I went to school just like you did. I believed in all that oakie-doak and then I woke up one day and said later for that stuff because that stuff would just mess up my mind, just mess up my mind. I hustled and did a little bit of everything to stay alive.
“I got a couple of kids by some sister on the other side of town but I never see them. What can I say to them?”
He said that he and his buddy paid his 10-year old cousin to watch for National Guard patrols while they were staked out on roofs. They communicated with him by a toy walkie-talkie.
“It was funny for a while because all they could do was lay there and holler at one another. Man, it was beautiful. We controlled the scene.
“We were just like guerrillas—real ones.”