THE DISORDERS in Detroit from July 23 to July 28, 1967 in 35 square miles of the city resulted in 43 deaths (33 black and 10 white), $100 million in property damage, 7,200 arrests; 682 burned buildings, 2,700 looted stores, and the complete immobilization of a city. Detroit's black uprising of 1967 was the most extensive of over 200 civil disorders in 1967.
The city in which this occurred is identified with its liberal Mayor Cavanaugh, UAW's Walter Reuther, and the largest NAACP chapter in the country. Earlier, a French physician writing under the name of Louis-Ferdinand Celine who visited Detroit described it this way:
. . . a group of great squat buildings full of windows through which you could see, like a cage full of flies, men moving about, but only just moving, as if they were contending very feebly against Heaven knows what impossibility. . . . Hardly anyone spoke.