Mapping the Detroit Uprising of 1967

The item-based structure of Omeka S allows us to tie each individual item back to its original form, such as a personal record, newspaper, or a police record. This allows us to document provenance and the ways items were manifested in their collecting institutions. By utilizing the mapping module, users of our online archive have an interactive tool that demonstrates where records and events took place, and how the physical spaces around 12th Street looked and changed at the time of the Uprising. The user is able to drive their own experience with the mapping tool and react and respond to the archive. We hope that they can interpret the information in a way that makes the year’s dynamics of racism, resistance, and militarization visible to them.

Our selection criteria focused on digitized materials, mostly photographs, newspaper articles, and other related ephemera, that documented the National Guard’s deployment, police action, and other militarization and physical impacts of the 1967 Uprising in Detroit. Simultaneously, we emphasized selecting materials that were traceable as close to a physical coordinate point as possible. Whether the original description of the digitized source contained a street crossing or business name, or names of historically-derived churches or hospitals, we valued providing an accurate-as possible-geolocation of our sources to physically document the moments in the photographs. 

We located our archival materials through online digitized materials from the Detroit Public Library’s Burton Historical Collection, Wayne State University Archives, and online resources from the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. Utilizing previously digitized material available online encouraged us to consistently send our users back to the original sources whenever possible. As you browse our site, you will have the opportunity to link back to the archive that houses the material. We encourage you to do so, and use our site as a jumping-off point to explore more digitized material of your choosing that sparks your interest from the several Detroit and southeast Michigan-based digitized archives we relied on for our materials.

The primary users of our archives are those who are interested in the history of Detroit, especially those who are passionate about the social movements and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The archive showcases to these primary users how the Uprising, and the response from the state and federal government, affected the built environment. In terms of the needs of the primary users, the target audience will likely also have an interest in the long-term consequences of the events. The geolocation module of the archive can help create a before-and-after timeline of the Detroit Uprising to see how the city was affected. The primary users may also focus on learning about the personal histories of eyewitnesses to the Uprising, and those who were directly affected by it. Finding pictures of homes and businesses owned by Detroit residents during the Uprising will be crucial in researching the history of the city during an unstable time.

The secondary users of this archive are wide-ranging. The archive can be used by middle school and high school teachers to teach a more in-depth history of Detroit by using the mapping module. Students in middle and high school can utilize this site for projects based on Detroit history during the civil rights movement and the “long hot summer.” Most importantly, a key user group can be community members; using the archive can help relate historical events to collective memory and reveal the manifestations of the city’s history in its present day.

Our goal is to represent the material and local impacts of state militarization against civilian protest and resistance. By including photos of how the National Guard repurposed community spaces, such as a hospital and a school playground, we aim to document actions that impacted a large community of residents. Our archive includes photos, newspaper articles, and historical documents that include language from original metadata such as “race riot” and “civil disturbance” to describe an event that occurred because of many years of building tension due to racism and discrimination in Detroit, and that was initiated by a mass arrest of people gathered to celebrate the return of two soldiers. We retain and point out some of the original language because it contains key information about the way racism functioned in this setting. We are missing representations of long-term community memory and Black residents’ first-hand accounts. These voices are present in the historical record, but less so in the digitized collections we researched for our project, because of multiple factors including bias and inaccessibility in documentation, mistrust that people may feel around representation by archivists, and a focus on fire and property destruction rather than violence against people in the historical record. In a new paradigm of community archiving, the voices of community residents may better illuminate that the events of Detroit in 1967 were not a riot but an uprising.