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CHAPTER 18 The Ameliorative Response "In addition to being the scene of the nation's worst Negro riot of this period, Detroit," the Detroit Free Press's Philip Meyer judged in November 1968, "may be remembered as the city that tried the hardest to do the most for racial peace" in response to a riot. Five years later J. David Greenstone and Paul Peterson concluded that Detroit's Mayor Cavanagh "responded in a more ameliorative, less punitive fashion to the 1967 race riots than did the mayor of any other large city."! The same generalization can also be made regarding the riot response of Detroit's private sector. If the Detroit riot is best seen as a form of protest designed to call attention to black grievances and the black community, the rioters succeeded at least in part in attaining their objective. "Detroit," the head of the Mayor's Development Team (MDT) observed a few days after the riot, "faces a great challenge in rebuilding itself as a social and physical community - in creating a livable city." The principal responsibility of creating this "livable city" rested with the city government, but it recognized that it could not hope to accomplish the task without substantial assistance from the state and federal governments and the private sector as well. "It's too big for any city to handle," Ray Girardin remarked with regard to the crisis of the cities just after the riot. "It will take [the] combined brains and effort of the nation."2 In responding to the 1967 riot, Detroit was handicapped by the racial polarization the riot had magnified and the city's deteriorating fiscal condition. Two major strikes - by Ford Motor Company workers from September 6 to October 25, 1967, and by the city's two daily newspapers from November 16, 1967, to August 9, 1968-further hampered the city's efforts to deal with its racial problems.3 After incurring a deficit of $11 million in the fiscal year 1966-67, Detroit anticipated even more serious budget shortfalls in the years to come because of the diminished yield from the local property tax, the city's chief source of revenue. In seeking to fill the gap between the city's income and its needs, Cavanagh not only had to deal with a Common Council that was reluctant to raise taxes, but he was also disappointed in 425 426 Violence in the Model City the degree of assistance Detroit received from the state of Michigan and the federal government.4 Testifying before the Kerner Commission on August 15, 1967, Cavanagh warned that it was a delusion to think that the remedy for riots was "sterner measures of force and repression" rather than a frontal assault on the underlying causes of the disorders. He spoke in a similar way to the people of Detroit in his initial postriot report on September 6. While seeking to assure his constituents that law and order would be maintained, he told them that the way to prevent riots was to "convert social liabilities into community assets" and to eliminate the second-class status of Detroit's black citizens. It was essential, he said, to make the Twelfth Street area a safe and dynamic neighborhood, improve housing, provide jobs and job training, reduce the welfare rolls, and improve ghetto schools.5 The effort to rehabilitate Twelfth Street and the Virginia Park area, it will be recalled, had been initiated before the riot with the establishment of the Virginia Park Services Corporation. Following the riot, the Service Corporation hired Wayne State University sociologist James E. Boyce as a planner for the rehabilitation project and as an "advocate" of the community's needs with city departments. This was the first use in the United States of the advocate-planner concept. By the end of 1967 the Services Corporation had prepared a blueprint for the rehabilitation of the Virginia Park area and had gained Common Council approval. The plan, which embodied the wishes of the people living in the area, called for a 120-foot-wide boulevard on Twelfth Street, with three lanes on each side of a central parkway extending the mile from West Grand Boulevard to Clairmount. A shopping area and a community center on the west side of the street were to replace the 175 stores built in the decade following World War I. New low-cost housing was to be constructed along the boulevard. In January 1968 the Services Corporation submitted a grant...

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