A lot of people who write about the Detroit riot of 1967 have missed what was in plain sight. The Kerner Commission’s report of 1968, which examined the causes of the riot, laid out some important facts but missed their significance.
Here’s what I wrote in my book The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey in a chapter titled “Free Markets versus Discrimination.”
During a five-day period in July 1967, 43 people were killed during a riot in Detroit’s inner city. President Johnson then appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, the so-called Kerner Commission, named after the then-governor of Illinois who headed it–to look into the causes of that and other riots during the summer of 1967 and to make recommendations that would prevent such riots in the future. When its report came out in 1968, it made a big splash. The report stated that black poverty was a big cause of the Detroit riots, and its recommendations for more government jobs and housing programs for inner-city residents were explicitly based on that assumption. These recommendations are what received much of the publicity at the time and are what most people took away from the report. Too bad more people didn’t actually read the report. The Commission’s own account of the Detroit riot tells a different story. Here’s the report’s first paragraph on Detroit:
On Saturday evening, July 22, the Detroit Police Department raided five “blind pigs.” The blind pigs had their origin in prohibition days, and survived as private social clubs. Often, they were after-hours drinking and gambling spots.
These “blind pigs” were places that inner-city blacks went to be with their friends, to drink, and to gamble; in other words, they were places where people went to peacefully enjoy themselves and each other. The police had a policy of raiding these places, presumably because the gambling and drinking were illegal. The police expected only two dozen people to be at the fifth blind pig, the United Community and Civic League on 12th Street, but instead found 82 people gathered to welcome home two Vietnam veterans, and proceeded to arrest them. “Some,” says the Commission report, “voiced resentment at the police intrusion.” The resentment spread and the riot began.
In short, the triggering cause of the Detroit riot, in which more people were killed than in any other riot that summer, was the government crackdown on people who were going about their lives peacefully. The last straw for those who rioted was the government suppression of peaceful, albeit illegal, black capitalism. Interestingly, in its many pages of recommendations for more government programs, the Commission never suggested that the government should end its policy of preventing black people from peacefully drinking and gambling.
The government’s fingerprints show up elsewhere in the Commission’s report. Urban renewal “had changed 12th Street [where the riot began] from an integrated community into an almost totally black one…” says the report. The report tells of another area of the inner city to which the rioting had not spread. “As the rioting waxed and waned,” states the report, “one area of the ghetto remained insulated.” The 21,000 residents of a 150-square-block area on the northeast side had previously banded together in the Positive Neighborhood Action Committee (PNAC) and had formed neighborhood block clubs. These block clubs were quickly mobilized to prevent the riot from spreading to this area. “Youngsters,” writes the Commission, “agreeing to stay in the neighborhood, participated in detouring traffic.” The result: no riots, no deaths, no injuries, and only two small fires, one of which was set in an empty building.
What made this area different was obviously the close community the residents had formed. But why had a community developed there and not elsewhere? The report’s authors unwittingly hint at the answer. “Although opposed to urban renewal,” the Commission reports, “they [the PNAC] had agreed to co-sponsor with the Archdiocese of Detroit a housing project to be controlled jointly by the archdiocese and PNAC.” In other words, the area that had avoided rioting had also successfully resisted urban renewal, the federal government’s program of tearing down urban housing in which poor people lived and replacing it with fewer houses aimed at a more upscale market. Economist Martin Anderson, in his 1963 book, The Federal Bulldozer, showed that urban renewal had torn down roughly four housing units for every unit it built. The Commission, instead of admitting that urban renewal was a contributing factor, recommended more of it. Their phrasing is interesting, though, because it admits so much about the sorry history of the program:
Urban renewal has been an extremely controversial program since its inception. We recognize that in many cities it has demolished more housing than it has erected, and that it has often caused dislocation among disadvantaged groups.
Nevertheless, we believe that a greatly expanded but reoriented urban renewal program is necessary to the health of our cities.
In short, the commission’s remedy for poison was to increase the dosage.
READER COMMENTS
Ricky
Jun 10 2020 at 2:35am
In the 1920’s a thug from Georgia emerged onto the Russian political seen. He told the poor they were victims. He told them they didn’t need to have an education, work hard, or create anything of value. All they had to do was grab a gun, march onto the capital, and take down their fictional oppressor.
Sports leagues are almost entirely black. Why do you think that is? Do you think it might have something to do with athleticism? Should we handicap blacks, and allow more whites, Hispanics, and Asians to play – since they are on average less athletic?
Should we tell Asian Americans, who dominant this “patriarchy” in the medical field to stop applying for medical jobs, and to medical schools, because they are overrepresented? Do you think maybe they are overrepresented because of good parenting, a great amount of time studying, and aptitude?
There is nothing more fair than a meritocracy. Those who don’t make it to the top of the hierarchy are not oppressed. They simply don’t have the skills to get there. Nobody stopped Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell from becoming extraordinary academics. Nobody stopped Will Smith and Morgan Freeman from becoming extraordinary actors. And nobody stopped Ben Carson from becoming a world renowned Surgeon. They got to the top with a combination of intelligence, work-ethic, and skill.
Marxism will never succeed!
Mark Brady
Jun 10 2020 at 2:57am
May we assume that the “thug from Georgia” is Stalin? And if so, when and where does Stalin say what you claim he said?
Matthias Görgens
Jun 10 2020 at 10:48pm
It is not useful to pretend that everything we might dislike would stem from the same source.
Just like we know that capitalism or neoliberalism is not the root of all perceived evil, neither is Marxism.
There’s more than one good and one bad thing in the world.
Dustin
Jun 11 2020 at 12:48pm
All of this writing and not once do you recognize that our social constructs are significant predictors of individual outcomes. The injustice is that our institutions effectively stack the deck against certain populations.
Jim Crow laws, mass incarceration, and systemic racism are absolutely and unequivocally forms of oppression. The consequence of this oppression has placed every black person in the US at a position of extreme disadvantage. Telling them to “just deal with and work hard” is stunning lack of reflection.
We’ve destroyed entire communities with explicit oppression, and it’s on us to help them rebuild.
David Seltzer
Jun 10 2020 at 6:37pm
I grew up in East Chicago Indiana. The neighborhoods in our small steel town were fairly well integrated owing to strong industry drawing people from the South and newly arrived immigrants from post war Europe. About a third of my high school graduating class were Black, Hispanic and newly settled immigrants. In 1970, Urban Renewal became a reality in our town. My father, a staunch libertarian, was incensed at the prospect of integrated neighborhoods being fractured and forced into segregation. The East Chicago Housing Authority built several public housing complexes with federal, taxpayer, financing in the early 1970’s. The authority’s director quietly took more than $100,000 in kickbacks for steering various contracts to friends and associates. In the end, city officials decided to build several more public housing units so as to keep millions of dollars in federal urban renewal money flowing into East Chicago.
Data released last summer showing lead concentrations of up to 237 times the Environmental Protection Agency’s allowable limit for residential use in the soil at the complex have raised serious questions about why the complex was built at all on the former Anaconda factory site at East 151st Street and McCook Avenue. More than 1,000 residents at the complex, including some 680 children, have been ordered to relocate.
The future also remains uncertain for the hundreds of residents who own homes in the middle and eastern parts of the Calumet neighborhood, many of whom face health problems and the possibility of falling property values.
The EPA last summer began a cleanup in those sections of the neighborhood, which were built in the shadow of industries that started operations as long as 100 years ago.
Idriss Z
Jun 10 2020 at 6:48pm
Really good read, and should certainly act as a lesson for future efforts in cities such as Detroit (especially Detroit). What I gathered from that example is the need for local governance to be tied to responsible (not wasteful) property management. The difficulty in destroying something and trying to build something new is often underestimated presently because of the lack of appreciation for correcting the underlying problems.
What I believe the approach should be from the above is to assess what neighborhoods are at similar strength to PNAC and partner with them and for other neighborhoods to identify what areas are lacking and trying to improve them with specificity (schools, communtiy clubs, libraries, organized local political concils, good local journalism, etc…).
@Mark- sports is a much different type, and purer type of meritocracy. If I stumble onto an oilfield on my property (and thus owning all of the oil on that pool) I can by the surrounding properties and pass them off to my heirs. You cannot do this with athletic ability (inherent athletic ability is much different than what is required for sports super stardom, the odds of someone well-over 6 feet having healthy posture is quite low). Similarly, medical practices, college legacies, law offices, businesses are all inheritable, sports (and musical) stardom is incredibly rare to replicate.
SaveyourSelf
Jun 14 2020 at 8:48am
Yes. People predictably rebel when they feel they are “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
No. The quote you pasted literally reads “the evidence on urban renewal contradicts everything the program is intended to do, but we should greatly expand it.” But between the lines it reads, “the stated intentions of the program are not the actual goals of the program. Reducing the number and concentration of blacks in the city is the actual (unstated) goal. And in that, it is so effective we should aggressively pursue more urban renewal for ‘the health of our cities.'” This is…it makes me ill to make this analogy but it’s so dead that I would be remiss if I didn’t…”The solution to pollution is dilution” is a useful heuristic in environmental management. In a democracy, it is also a useful tactic for diminishing the power base of successful minorities.
SaveyourSelf
Jun 14 2020 at 9:02am
Thank you, David, for posting the summary of the 150 block Northeast side community response to the riot. This is real world evidence supporting the “Citizenship Agreement” model. Where citizenship is the contractual agreement between neighbors (citizens) to 1) Withhold actions that cause physical harm to other citizens. (justice) and 2) Help other citizens who are threatened with physical harm defend themselves (common defense pact). I fleshed out how I thought the model would function in Adam Smith and the Tower of Justice but this is the first small scale evidence I’ve seen in support of the theory. I nailed it. Fantastic!
SaveyourSelf
Jun 14 2020 at 11:51am
These quotes give more clarity to the commissions position on urban renewal:
“…we believe that the emphasis of the program should be changed from traditional publicly built slum based high rise projects to smaller units on scattered sites.”
“Unless there are sharp changes in the factors influencing Negro settlement patterns within metropolitan areas, there is little doubt that the trend toward Negro majorities will continue.”
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