Welcome to our site, Mapping the Detroit Uprising of 1967.
This archive is a collection of materials that demonstrate the impact of the 1967 Detroit Uprising, and ensuing U.S. National Guard deployment, on the city’s built environment and the ways that people continue to live within it. We are four graduate students in archival and library science with varied academic backgrounds in history and public history, political science, ethnic studies, anthropology, carceral state studies, humanities, and literature. We chose this project because of our physical proximity to the city and archival collections at the Detroit Public Library, our shared interest in how empire and resistance are manifested in human geographies, and our consciousness of present-day recurrences of National Guard deployment against civilians.
The Detroit Uprising, often named as a catalyzing event of public protest and police brutality in the “long hot summer of 1967,” began when the Detroit Police Department’s vice squad initiated a raid on an unlicensed bar at 12th St and Clairmount Ave, in the early hours of the morning on July 23. Cops arrested an estimate of eighty-five Black residents, on no charge besides having gathered at the bar that night, where they were celebrating the return of two community members from Vietnam. The mass arrest drew a crowd of onlookers, and the ensuing week of protest, police violence, and military occupation led to a loss of lives, homes, and Black-owned businesses and gathering places. Even at the federal level, the Uprising was quickly recognized as a direct result of segregation, racism in housing and employment, and state-driven criminalization and surveillance of Black American communities, most notably in the 426-page report of the Kerner Commission, convened by Lyndon B. Johnson shortly after his decision to deploy the National Guard. In this project, our attention is toward how occupying police and military forces approached, repurposed, and altered the physical spaces that people called home in Detroit in order to suit their purposes of quelling rebellion against the state.
Browse our items below, and click on each item to view our metadata.
