Project Description
Documentary Focus
Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus, or “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes” is a collaborative online archive documenting the events and aftermath of the 1967 Detroit Riots. The title of this archive comes from the motto of the City of Detroit, which reflects the duality of devastation and resilience that characterize this period in the city’s history. There was significant contrast in the responses between the local and state governments and the communities of Detroit in the aftermath of the riots. This archive seeks to surface and explore the tension between these groups. To acknowledge the presence of potentially distressing materials, the archive provides a content warning for images that depict racial violence, weaponry, and destruction, which may be sensitive to some readers.
Criteria for Record Selection
Materials for this project were sourced from several local Ann Arbor and Detroit-based repositories including University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library and Hatcher Graduate Library, the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection, and the Detroit Historical Society. This archive also features visual material from the Rosa Parks Papers, Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Records were chosen to provide insight into the immediate aftermath of the 1967 Detroit Riots and efforts to rebuild the city in the years following. Selection emphasized materials reflecting the experiences of Detroit’s Black Residents, the socio-political climate, as well as themes of racial inequality, police brutality, economic recovery, and social reform. Materials were chosen based on their relevance, historical significance, and ability to communicate a nuanced view of the events and their consequences.
Although we aimed to curate a comprehensive digital collection, certain limitations influenced the scope of this archive. Some collections have restricted permissions, others are not available digitally, and some cannot be digitized, constraining the range of accessible materials. In our selection process, we also sought to show sensitivity by critically considering the reasoning behind the inclusion of potentially intimate or violent content. Our intention was to avoid causing additional harm through the unnecessary representation of traumatic images. Given the recentness of the 1967 Detroit Riots, we also considered the ethical implications of featuring images or writings of individuals who may still be living. Through this process of deliberate curation and evaluation, we sought to create an archive that provides a resource for learning about the 1967 Detroit Riots, while representing people and events with dignity and sensitivity.
Consideration of Archival Concepts and Practices
Materials in this online archive have been arranged in chronological order and by topic. This was done to educate users about the events that unfolded in the Summer of 1967 in Detroit. However, given that several repositories were drawn from in order to populate this site, there is little to no collection-level original order to maintain. The archivists responsible for creating this collection worked to ensure that each resource included in this archive has not been internally rearranged or altered. This primarily pertains to multi-page documents in which a user is able to view each document as a separate entity.
In order to reframe the dominant narrative that many people hold about the 1967 Detroit Riots, the archivists responsible for creating this archive took great care to center the voices and experiences of the marginalized communities most directly impacted by the uprising through the practice of arrangement. Doing so invokes the power that archivists have to influence social memory through the process of archival representation (Yakel, 2003). One of the primary considerations while creating this archive pertains to the construction of race and social power, and how these influence the dominant narratives the American collective consciousness holds about the 1967 Detroit Riots. While developing the collections featured in this archive, the participating archivists considered how to respect the stories and lived experiences of the Black Americans directly impacted by the violence and destruction that took place, recognizing that this was a response to centuries of racism and oppression. Drawing from perspectives featured in Tonia Sutherland’s work, the archivists carefully considered the materials that were included so as to respect the privacy of photographed individuals, as well as to mitigate the re-traumatization of individuals engaging with the archive collection (2017).
Target User Group
The primary users of this archive are high school, undergraduate, and graduate students seeking to develop their analysis and research skills and become more empowered historians while learning about Detroit’s history. This archive is particularly relevant to student users in Michigan because it offers valuable insights into the 1967 Detroit Riots, a pivotal event in the city’s socio-political history. For students in Michigan, particularly those studying local history or racial discrimination, this archive provides insight into perspectives that are often overlooked in mainstream historical accounts.
Student users may be more interested in a format that includes a range of resource types, so we included both documents, photographs, and audio. This topic may be completely new for student users, so we incorporated summaries, captions, and descriptions to provide contextual background. Additionally, users who are new to archives may benefit from an intuitive and user-friendly interface to help guide them through navigating the resources. Thus, this site has clearly labeled pages, sections, a search bar, as well as instructions on how to use the site. Secondary users of this archive would consist of teachers and other educators in Michigan who can use the materials we include to create lesson plans and class learning activities to share the impactful history of Detroit. To further enhance the searchability of materials on this site, we include a Browse page where both primary and secondary users can perform a filtered search and click on items to view more information.
Perspectives
This archive primarily represents the perspectives of Black Detroiters during the uprising. Since this historical event is deeply intertwined with Detroit’s history of racial violence, we wanted to prioritize the perspective of the people who were directly impacted by this violence. The perspectives of Black Detroiters are expressed by images, documents, and oral histories that depict what they did, what they experienced, and how they felt during and after the event. As Sutherland (2017) writes “[the] act of remembering, of re-constituting—or (re)membering—is a powerful aspect of bearing witness, of rendering visible what has been made indiscernible or unrecognizable.” Presenting the experiences and perspectives of Black Detroiters as the foreground of our archive allows us and our users to bear witness to and confront the reality of the discrimination that African Americans faced in Detroit and all over the world. Additional voices that are present in the archive include those of the community-based organizations with the mission to rebuild Detroit and address the issues that caused the uprising.
Our archive is missing the explicit perspectives of white Detroiters or Michiganders, police and military personnel, or Michigan and national politicians. Archival description and arrangement inevitably privileges some perspectives and diminishes others (Duff and Harris, 2002), and given the racial tensions and violence that were at work in the topic of our archive, we thought that it would be remiss for us to attempt to justify the perspectives of actors that caused so much direct harm to the same community that we wanted to highlight the voices of in this archive.
