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CHAPTER 3 The "Divided City" Following the riot, a Kerner Commission staffer reported that he had not found a single black in Detroit who was "happy" about conditions in the city.1 Throughout the years of the Cavanagh mayoralty preceding the July 1967 riot, there was, indeed, a steady drumbeat of complaints by blacks regarding their general condition and the racial status quo in Detroit. Those conditions and the black perception of them do not in themselves fully explain why the riot occurred, when it occurred, and where in the city it occurred, but one can nevertheless assume that since it was blacks primarily who rioted, there was something about their circumstances that persuaded at least some of them to take to the streets and others to express support for the riotous behavior that resulted. Black complaints centered about the segregated existence of the city's nonwhite population, mistreatment by merchants, the shortage of recreational facilities, the quality of education and housing available to blacks, the way the war on poverty operated in Detroit, and, most important of all, jobs and the behavior of the police. A series of incidents punctuated the racial calm in the city, but it was not until July 1967 that Detroit experienced a full-fledged riot. As a 1966 survey of the adult population of the Detroit standard metropolitan statistical area revealed, the "interaction" between blacks and whites paralleled their "housing lines" in the city. The investigators concluded that Detroit was becoming "increasingly segregated in interaction as well as housing."2 At the same time, Detroit in its public policy was moving in the direction of integration, but doing so at too slow a pace to satisfy the city's blacks. In 1963 the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) referred twenty-eight violations of Michigan's stringent equal accommodations statute to the Police Department's Community Relations Bureau. There were additional complaints in 1964, but thanks to state and federal law, the Subcommittee on Public Accommodations of the Citizens Committee for Equal Opportunity (CCEO) was able to report in June 1965 that "perhaps the one area" in which equal opportunity had been largely achieved was access to 39 40 Violence in the Model City places of public accommodation. The next year the CCEO decided that it no longer needed a subcommittee on public accommodations.3 Racial discrimination had long been a "serious problem" in the majority of Detroit's hospitals and in the health field in general. The efforts of the city government's civil rights organization beginning in 1952 to cope with this problem were supplemented in 1962 by a Community Coordinating Council composed of representatives of several black organizations that gathered data regarding bias in Detroit hospitals. Responding to the charges of discrimination, the Common Council in 1963 enacted a hospital ordinance that forbade discrimination in medical services, the use of facilities and bed assignments, the appointment of doctors, nurses, and other hospital employees, and in the nurse training program. The ordinance appeared to have little effect during the next several years, the state Civil Rights Commission (CRC) reporting in July 1966 that hospital bias remained a "serious" problem in Detroit. The report was a spur to action, the CRC noting in February 1967 that there was by then "little confirmed discrimination in hospital employment."4 The health of blacks, however, judging from infant mortality rates, cases of tuberculosis, and examinations for venereal disease, continued to be much inferior to that of whites.5 In a postriot survey conducted at the beginning of 1968, 53 percent of the black Detroit respondents aged sixteen to sixty-nine indicated that they were "somewhat" or "very dissatisfied" with the parks and playgrounds available in their neighborhoods, and 48 percent expressed a similarly negative opinion about the available sports and recreation centers for teenagers. Blacks were more dissatisfied with their recreational facilities than whites, 38 percent of whom were dissatisfied with their neighborhood parks and playgrounds and 39 percent with their neighborhood recreation centers. Public recreational facilities were lacking in low-income neighborhoods and especially in the Twelfth Street-Dexter area, which became the principal center of the 1967 riot. After the riot, the Mayor's Development Team described the Department of Parks and Recreation as "an ingrown agency" that was "viewed with hostility by large segments of the community." The team reported that the department had been inadequately responsive to demographic changes in the city in the preceding...

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