On a more serious note what do you think could have been done to prevent the whole episode? I heard a guy on WJR this morning saying that the mayor controlled the police dept and he ordered them to stand down initially thinking I guess it would burn out. He was saying if the police tried to establish order quickly it wouldn’t have happened. Home ownership rates by blacks in Detroit were higher than many other parts of the states and relations between the black community and white community were not worse in Detroit than many other places? Employment was relatively high as well. So why did this happen in Detroit?. It certainly started a long slide downhill.
Jerome Cavanagh was the Democratic mayor of the city of Detroit during the riots. Initially thought of by voters as another JFK, it was his actions (or inaction) during the riots that doomed his reputation. Cavanagh – who by today’s standards would be considered a progressive – rode into office in 1961, in fact, owing to his support from Motown’s black community. He was also relatively young, being 33 when he took office in 1962 and only 38 when the riots started.
By that year, white flight to the suburbs was already well underway and car makers were building new auto plants in those suburbs, leading to financial troubles for the city from loss of part of its tax base. He also inherited a $28 million budget gap in 1962, something that he dealt with by pushing through the state legislature an income tax as well as a commuter tax, both of which exist to this day. He deemed those taxes necessary to pay for a number of social programs he wanted implemented.
Cavanagh’s police force was also almost completely white. I believe that only about 50 of its officers in 1967 were black or of another minority group. And Motown for years had been dogged by accusations that its police engaged in widespread abuse of the citizenry it was charged with protecting, most particularly among the city’s minority communities. Cavanagh had proved largely unable to reform the force during his time in office leading up to the riots, something that would haunt him during the days of rage as well as in their aftermath.
Eisenhower’s interstate highway system was also largely completed by 1967, and it ringed the Motor City and ran through it, allowing people to move out of town much more easily and to commute into it for jobs. All these developments, which Cavanagh either was powerless to deal with or refused to deal with, combined to make the long, hot summer of 1967 a tinderbox that only needed a spark to set it ablaze. The police raid on that after-hours gambling joint on 12th street on July 23 of that year provided that spark.
Once the riots took off in earnest, Cavanagh’s natural sympathies toward the black community – laudable, of course – took over and he did in fact issue a series of orders to his police department that echoed former Democratic Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s in 2015, during that city’s own riots after the death of a black man named Freddie Gray, who was fatally injured while in police custody. She’d been noted on the record as requiring her own police forces to give rioters ‘space to destroy’ and while Cavanagh never said anything as explicit as Blake’s remarks about rioters his actions were just as powerful.
Cavanagh felt that a large police presence, needed in order to quell the beginnings of the riot on 12th Street, would have just made things worse, so he largely handcuffed his police force, ordering Detroit Police Department commanders to pull officers back and to stay as low-key as possible. The riot lasted for five days and has been adjudged to have been the worst of the approximate 400 riots that the nation experienced in the 1960s. He was lambasted and bitterly criticized by all sides – including the black community, many of whose members lost homes and businesses to rioters – for his failure to act decisively.
Cavanagh declined in 1969 to run for reelection, owing almost completely to his failure to properly handle the 1967 riot – which was only quelled after Army and National Guard troops were finally sent in (some 17,000 of them). He left office in 1970 after the end of his term, his political career and hopes of future national office in ruins, much as the city over which he presided was left in ruins in July, 1967.
