Collective Meaning-Making of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion: Detroiters’ Stories about Causes and Consequences

Tina Law, CUNY Graduate Center

In the United States, urban unrest has long served as a barometer of race relations. Whenever an uprising erupts in a city—whether it is Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, Ferguson, or most recently, Minneapolis—Americans debate racial inequality, democracy, and violence for a while. But what happens afterward? Specifically, what happens to a city and its residents after they experience a physically, economically, and socially disruptive uprising? Substantial research exists on urban uprisings, but this research typically casts urban uprisings as “race riots” or aberrant acts of lawlessness with unambiguously negative consequences, and focuses overwhelmingly on diagnosing causes and assessing immediate damages. I offer a different approach that interprets urban uprisings as meaningful sociopolitical events with complex impacts that merit empirical inquiry rather than normative judgements. In this mixed method study, I examine the 1967 Detroit Rebellion and the efforts of Detroit residents to make sense of the event in its aftermath. I apply qualitative and computational methods to a rich set of 490 oral and written histories to analyze how Detroit residents think and talk about the event and the social implications of these personally-held narratives. Preliminary findings show that fifty years after the rebellion, Detroit residents—irrespective of race, gender, or age—readily diagnosed anti-Black policing as the primary cause of the event. However, residents continue to debate how the rebellion impacted their city, particularly in terms of local businesses, policing, and political power. The findings suggest that public and scholarly efforts are needed to help local communities to process the impacts of urban uprisings, and that a robust understanding of these events requires an investigation of their subjective and objective implications.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 91. From LA to Detroit