1967 Detroit riot
the bloodiest episode in the race riots erupted in the USA during the summer 1967, a series of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police Department, begun in the early morning hours of Sunday July 23, 1967, in Detroit, Michigan
The 1967 Detroit riot, also known as the 12th Street Riot and the Detroit Uprising, was the bloodiest of the urban riots in the United States during the "long, hot summer of 1967". Composed mainly of confrontations between African American residents and the Detroit Police Department, it began in the early morning hours of Sunday, July 23, 1967, in Detroit, Michigan.
The precipitating event was a police raid of an unlicensed, after-hours bar, known as a blind pig, on the city's Near West Side. It exploded into one of the deadliest and most destructive social insurgences in American history, lasting five days and surpassing the scale of Detroit's 1943 race riot 24 years earlier.
Governor George W. Romney ordered the Michigan Army National Guard into Detroit to help end the disturbance. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the United States Army's 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. The riot resulted in 43 deaths, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 400 buildings destroyed.
The scale of the riot was the worst in the United States since the 1863 New York City draft riots during the American Civil War, and it was not surpassed until the 1992 Los Angeles riots 25 years later.
The riot was prominently featured in the news media, with live television coverage, extensive newspaper reporting, and extensive stories in Time and Life magazines. The staff of the Detroit Free Press won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting for its coverage.
“1967 Detroit riot” enters the record as the bloodiest episode in the race riots erupted in the USA during the summer 1967, a series of confrontations between black residents and the Detroit Police Department, begun in the early morning hours of Sunday July 23, 1967, in Detroit, Michigan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Detroit, riot and bloodiest can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1967 Detroit riot” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Detroit, riot and bloodiest provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q768155. Authority coordinates are 42.376, -83.099. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967, 1943, 1863 and 1992.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1967 Detroit riot”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1967 Detroit riot primary sources, 1967 Detroit riot archive and Detroit research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1967 Detroit riot”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1967 Detroit riot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.