Altercations between youths started on June 20, 1943, on a warm Sunday evening on Belle Isle, a recreation area on an island in the Detroit River off Detroit's mainland. In what was considered a communal disorder, youths fought intermittently throughout the afternoon. The brawl eventually grew into a confrontation between groups of European Americans and African Americans on the long Belle Isle Bridge, crowded with pedestrians returning to the city, and it spread into the city. European American sailors joined fights against African Americans. The riot escalated in the city after a false rumor spread that a mob of European Americans had thrown an African-American mother and her baby into the Detroit River. African Americans looted and destroyed European American owned property but in the end, much more African American owned property was destroyed.
The rumors that gave rise to the riot reflected longstanding racial fears. Based on history, African American males feared European American male violence against African American women and children. Conversely, based on a false rumor, European Americans feared that African Americans had raped and murdered a European American woman on the Belle Isle Bridge. In response to the false rumor, angry mobs of European Americans spilled onto Woodward Avenue near the Roxy Theater around 4 a.m., beating blacks as they were getting off street cars on their way to work. Stores were looted and buildings were burned in the riot, most of them in the African American neighborhood of Paradise Valley, one of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods in Detroit.
The clashes soon escalated to the point where mobs of European Americans and African Americans were assaulting one another, beating innocent motorists, pedestrians and streetcar passengers, burning cars, destroying storefronts and looting businesses. Both sides were said to have encouraged others to join in the riots with false claims that one of "their own" was attacked unjustly. African Americans were outnumbered by a large margin, and suffered more deaths, personal injuries and property damage.
The riots lasted three days and ended after Mayor Jeffries and Governor Harry Kelly asked President Roosevelt to intervene. Roosevelt ordered in federal troops. A total of 6,000 troops restored peace and occupied the streets of Detroit. Over the course of three days of rioting, 34 people had been killed: 25 were African Americans, and 17 of these were killed by the police (the police forces at the time were predominately European American and dominated by descendants of immigrants). Thirteen murders remain unsolved. Of the approximately 600 persons injured, more than 75 percent were African American; of the roughly 1,800 people arrested over the course of the three-day riots, 85 percent were African American.
After the riot, leaders on both sides had explanations for the violence, effectively blaming the other side. European American city leaders, including the mayor, blamed young "black hoodlums” and persisted in framing the events as being caused by outsiders, people who were unemployed and marginal. The Wayne County prosecutor believed that leaders of the NAACP were to blame as instigators of the riots. Governor Kelly called together a Fact Finding Commission to investigate and report on the causes of the riot. Its mostly European American members blamed African American youths, and regarded the events as an unfortunate incident. The commissioners never interviewed any of the rioters but based their conclusions on police reports, which were limited.
Other officials drew similar conclusions, despite discovering facts that disproved their thesis. Dr. Lowell S. Selling of the Recorder's Court Psychiatric Clinic conducted interviews with 100 offenders, finding them to be "employed, well-paid, longstanding (of at least 10 years) residents of the city", with some education and a history of being law abiding. He attributed their violence to their Southern heritage. This view was repeated in a separate study by Elmer R. Akers and Vernon Fox, sociologist and psychologist, respectively, at the State Prison of Southern Michigan. Although most of the men they studied had jobs and had been in Detroit an average of more than 10 years, Akers and Fox characterized them as unskilled, unsettled, and stressed their Southern heritage as predisposing them to violence.
Detroit's African American leaders identified numerous other causes, including persistent racial discrimination in jobs and housing, the lack of African Americans among police officers and frequent police brutality against blacks, and the daily animosity directed at their people by much of Detroit's European American population.
A late 20th-century analysis of the facts collected on the arrested rioters has drawn markedly different conclusions, noting that European Americans were younger, generally unemployed, and had clearly traveled long distances from their homes to the African American neighborhood to attack people there. Even in the early stage of the riots near Belle Isle Bridge, European American youths traveled in groups to the riot area and carried weapons.
Later in the second stage, European Americans continued to act in groups and were prepared for action, carrying weapons and traveling miles to attack the ghetto along its western side at Woodward Avenue. African Americans arrested were older, often married and working men, who had lived in the city for 10 years or more. They fought closer to home, mainly acting independently to defend their homes, persons or neighborhood, and sometimes looting or destroying mostly European American owned property there in frustration. Where felonies occurred, European Americans were more often arrested for use of weapons and African Americans for looting or failing to observe the curfew imposed. European Americans were more often arrested for misdemeanors. In broad terms, both sides acted to improve their positions; the European Americans fought out of fear, African Americans fought out of hope for better conditions.
Following the violence, Japanese propaganda officials incorporated the event into its materials that encouraged African American soldiers not to fight for the United States. They distributed a flyer titled "Fight Between Two Races". The Axis Powers publicized the riot as a sign of Western decline.
Walter White, head of the NAACP, noted that there was no rioting at the Packard and Hudson plants, where leaders of the UAW and CIO had been incorporating blacks as part of the rank and file, part of the changes that had begun to open opportunities for blacks.
Future Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, then with the NAACP, assailed the city's handling of the riot. He charged that police unfairly targeted African Americans while turning their backs on European American atrocities. He said 85 percent of those arrested were African American while European Americans overturned and burned cars in front of the Roxy Theater with impunity as police watched. Marshall said: "This weak-kneed policy of the police commissioner coupled with the anti-Negro attitude of many members of the force helped to make a riot inevitable."
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