Danielle L. McGuire is the author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (2010), which won the OAH Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Southern Association of Women Historians' Julia Cherry Spruill Award, and received an honorable mention for the OAH Darlene Clark Hine Award. She is also a coeditor, with John Dittmer, of Freedom Rights: New Perspectives in the Civil Rights Movement (2011). Her new book, "Murder in the Motor City: The 1967 Detroit Riot and American Injustice," is forthcoming.
It has been fifty years since the flames of rage and frustration consumed one hundred blocks of Detroit. In just one terrifying week in the summer of 1967, forty-three people died, seven thousand people—mostly young African-American men—were arrested, and nearly twenty thousand armed policemen, National Guardsmen, and paratroopers patrolled the streets. As hundreds of businesses burned and citizens’ dreams were shattered, the slow and steady march of tanks with mounted machine guns announced the re-imposition of order with frightening clarity. In an effort to understand what caused the uprising in Detroit and several other cities in the tumultuous 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson convened the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which argued that nearly all the riots were rooted in a history of racial inequality and police violence. This talk focuses on the murder of three young African American men by white policemen on July 26, 1967 at the Algiers Motel in Detroit to help understand and reinterpret the history of the 1967 uprising and to contextualize the current focus on police violence and the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Investigating this case offers opportunities to explore not just the history of racial violence but also the ways in which ordinary men and women experienced, interpreted and survived it. By narrowing my focus to one case that began in the middle of one long, hot riotous night, this story captures the essence of the frustration and despair that fueled the rebellion and exposed the dark underside of the so-called “Model City,” where racial violence, inequality and segregation was every bit as virulent as in Mississippi or Alabama. Maybe it was even worse.