With all of the anticipation of new developments looking to debut in 2017 (Q-Line, Little Caesars Arena, Orleans Landing, etc.), 2017 will also mark the 50th anniversary of one of the city’s most direr moments, The riot (rebellion) of 1967. Most recently the Detroit Free Press featured a three-part series on the person responsible for the civil uprising that left a city battered and torn. William Walter Scott III, the then 19 year African American man who became frustrated with the inequality and injustice blacks were receiving at the hands of the predominantly white Detroit Police Department.
On the morning of July 23, 1967, Scott returned to his father’s club once he left work to only witness the destruction that was left behind at the hands of the DPD. That anger sparked Scott to relieve his frustration as he threw a trash container through the window of a pharmacy. This triggered people on 12th street to enter the drugstore and take whatever they could as well as begin to destroy any and everything within their community.
The article later goes into the regret Scott had as his once thriving community was now burning.
Scott is quotes as saying “The further I walked down Twelfth, the more I became aware of the destruction around me, which made me feel less of a man for being part of it.”
“A man doesn’t destroy his home; he protects it at all cost. This I hadn’t done; I let another man come and force me to destroy my own. This put me at his mercy. I became a boy once more. He could control me completely.”
After reading this article, I thought about how the aftermath of that fateful day forever changed the landscape of the city. Even in 2017, if you were to drive through certain areas of the city, the devastation of July 23, 1967 still remains. Shells of former businesses, dilapidated homes, and vast acres of vacant lots fill the landscape of the city.
This later led me to think of the devastation Ferguson, Missouri experienced after the murder of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown by the hands of Officer Darren Wilson, a white police officer who was not indicted on charges of murdering Brown. The announcement led to the small suburb outside of St. Louis burning for days as numerous buildings were now completely destroyed and a entire community left in disrepair.
As Scott mentioned, “A man doesn’t destroy his home,” as I witness the devastation taking place in Ferguson, that’s the first thing that came to my mind, why destroy the place you call home? Why destroy the businesses you patronize daily? Yes, I completely understand the anger as once again there was another unjustified death of a black man that had taken place in our country, but if we truly learn from historical events of this nature and take into account the devastation that occurred in cities such as Detroit and Newark, New Jersey during July 1967, it takes a very long time to recover from such a event.
As you can see, 50 years later, Detroit is just starting to bounce back.