In memorium & with great respect to all those who tragically lost their lives in the summer of Detroit, 1943.

On June 20th, 1943 a group of young black men were barred from access to recreational space in a white part of town following an uptick in racial animosity spurred on by growing immigration in the city of Detroit. Seeking refuge from the sun, they turned their sights to Belle Island where they played a game of dice with some white youths in the park. Accusations of cheating were quickly tossed around and before long a fight had broken out. Further enflamed by rumours spread around in Black and White nightclubs on the mainland this little scuffle in the park quickly devolved into an all-out race riot following days of violence, looting and arson from the 20th to the 22nd. In the end, 34 were confirmed dead and over 400 were left with various injuries. A moment of silence for all the victims and those affected by the senseless violence that took place on those unfortunate summer days.

Upon reviewing the data, timeline, and maps of what had happened on that unfortunate summer in Detroit, I believe the initial analysis was accurate. This was, in fact, a riot not an uprising, rebellion, or a mere disturbance. It was a spontaneous disorganised fit of violence. A city-wide civil disturbance that lasted 3 days. And given the data I’ve provided it seems that even if a small group of African American youths had instigated the riot, which there’s no evidence to say one group in particular instigating rather than another in my research so far; this was clearly a case where the white population had been disproportionately responsible for damages, violence, and the use of force. There were a lot of underlying racial insecurities between the blacks and whites as a result of cruel exclusionary laws & prejudice.

Most images of the riot and most accounts in the data show white groups tipping cars and beating on the black residents with officials either idly standing by or even participating in disproportionate use of force against the Afro-American community (often against looters, for example) rather than the whites who were inordinately responsible for the unlawful behaviour. If I was to consider the word-cloud visualisations, “Riot” was one of the most highly ranked descriptors and an emphasis was placed on racial terms such as “Colored” “Negro” and “White” so it’s not far-fetched to call it a race riot even by the standards of the press at the time.

This research topic was illuminating for me as it helped me get a better context for the more recent Floyd Riots that happened during COVID times since many of the concepts and tools for critical thinking can be applied there as well so I’d like to thank Prof. Robertson for presenting these ideas and the curriculum in such a clear and concise manner.

Based on this map events cluster the most within a straight line roughly down the direction of Hastings Street (but not all *on* Hastings Street per se.) When viewed from the Timeline POV the animation colours a fairly clear picture of the riot as things occurred at the time with most things happening in quick succession between noon on the 21st and the night of the 22nd. After that, the action quickly dies down and this also matches up with the fact that troops begin to intervene at this point in the riots as supported by official reports and first-hand accounts in the readings. In the Excel Data analysis, I made a chart and pointed out how much of the action seems to occur on Hastings at the intersections of where Black and white communities collide and I believe that to be accurate now with confirmation from the map. Overall I think this map does demonstrate the division among racial lines in the city

It appears that nearly all the events I made data for did appear on the map. barring a few exceptions where the location was unknown. This map accounts for roughly 95% of the data. One thing I found interesting about the timeline view was how you can clearly see that the scuffling went from incidents on Belle Isle into full-blown riots lining up the middle of the city. The timeline view really helps to bring the readings alive in that sense. As for event clusters, Assaults happened all over the city to varying degrees but the looting and shootings relating to lootings were more clustered around Hastings Street. As for the lootings you can see that the purple dots which represent looting are concentrated in and around Hastings with only one or two happening elsewhere.

Additionally, I chose white to make the map more readable and disabled roads since they may not match the historical roads at the time and I’m trying to avoid muddying the waters but the methodology is otherwise no different from my data sheet.

The data in this timeline represents roughly 80% of the data I’ve collected on the riot due to gaps in data where time was not provided. I considered leaving the data in with blank slots in their steed where information was sparse but the program would have trouble reading it that way and the graph would come out messy.

The biggest clusters we see are on the first day on belle island where events happen in quick succession as the riot is being kindled and primed to spread further. After this, we can see another uptick in activity between 2pm-4pm on the 21st and this is a mix of reports of lootings, assaults, police brutality, and shooting which are all fairly spread out across the map. There does not appear to be any pattern as to where things happened in these two hours but a lot of the activity is similar with much of it being Police violence. both beatings and shootings. Based on the readings to get more context there appeared to be a greater police mobilization effort around the end of the day that day and so its not surprising to see this uptick in police violence.

On the 20th between 3pm and 11:30pm we can see many assaults occurring condensed around Belle Island which as stated before makes sense considering that skirmishes on Belle is where the violence initially broke out before reaching the mainland and being further enflamed by rumour and speculation. If we’re looking for a general trend in activity it appears most of the riots find their energy after noon and in the night and there appears to be consistently less activity in the mornings.

Between 9:45pm on June 21st and 3pm on June 22nd there’s a nearly complete lull in activity. I’m inclined to say this is due to faults in my data collection, mainly that I did not collect enough. However, if we look at the readings it’s also true that a major crackdown and martial law became implemented around then so I’d be inclined to believe even if I did collect enough data points it likely would still be in a downturn around that time.

The timeline has not changed my view of the events much. I feel that much of what was uncovered in the timeline view was already found in the map’s timeline though the fact that you can see events and how they overlapped in the timeline is very insightful, it’s interesting how you can see events as they change in real-time and justify them based on the readings making inferences on why activity ticked up or why it came to a halt.

After doing a deep dive into the text on 3 specific sources I found that the most frequent words used are “Negro”/”Negros”, “White”/”Whites”, “Colored”, “Riots”/”Rioting” and”Police”.  This goes to show an emphasis across the board on the racial and rioting elements of the event.

Barring racial terms the most common terms are those pertaining to locations and objects of attack such as cars and busses. I’m not sure if there was an issue with my data set but when I did read through the articles I saw many OCR errors both misspelling errors and completely wrong outputs consisting of random symbols. I was looking for more specific terms such as “Said” “Spoken” or “Mentioned” to see if I could determine which voices were elevated but I could not find anything of the like. The words I did find were not the most helpful. This may be an issue with my data pruning process though I was very careful not to prune off anything I could see as even the slightest bit insightful. The terms I did prune often were references to locations or terms like “island” “park” and “Isle” which are really just proxies for “Belle” which is already inside the dataset.

Comparing the newspapers against the report when we look at the distinctive use of words between them, the report favours the term “Colored” over the term “Negro” as it has the highest usage of the word “Colored” and the lowest for “Negro” despite it being the longest of the three sources. In general, it seems like the report attempts to use more clinical language trying to focus more on events as they happened and not a sensational account although upon reading the report in its entirety it is quite biased on where it places the blame. The papers use more colourful language such as “Beaten”, “Yelled” “Riot” and “Mobs” in larger numbers relative to how much shorter the news articles actually are. Both the Black and the White newspapers presented very one-sided accounts of the events and it’s unclear how much is rumour or reality.

I will say the white article starts off a bit stronger being more fact-based whereas the Black article does start with a more sensational headline and introductory story. But at the same time, I believe the Black paper was completely in the right to highlight the stories that it did because their voices were being drowned out everywhere else so even if these articles are a little sensational I think there is some value in the Black article that helped me get more context and learn about some additional stories I may have otherwise missed. As for the text itself, the Black paper favoured the word Colored as opposed to “Negro” and the opposite is true for the white article. There is more race-baiting in the white article when I opened up and viewed the context and I would say the preference for the term “Negro” suggests loaded language in some sense. Examples of this include the use of the phrases “Negro mob” and “Gang of Negros”. I’d also point out that words appear to take on different meanings between the articles. For instance, the word “Mob” typically implied white mobs in the black article and black mobs in the white article.

The Text Analysis reaffirms my decision to label this event as a Race Riot as all the keywords, the context, and even the relation between many of these words suggest a racially motivated riot. But I’d also say some good additional insights came out of this analysis for instance my assumption coming into this was that the term “Boys” was largely used as a racially charged reference to black men but when we view the text’s relational links “Boys” in these articles is used pretty evenly to describe both Blacks and whites alike with the term “Men” actually used more commonly based on this analysis in reference to Black men as opposed to whites. Even when I drill down and look into the context it appears not to be as loaded as my initial bias would inform me to believe.

The data down below was created from articles and papers based on both Black and white perspectives of the events. I’ll start in advance by pointing out the fact that a labelled the news sources as being “Sensational”. In my estimation, these papers are somewhere in between Sensational and Informational but I label them Sensational to err on the side of caution even though to my knowledge the data within them was accurate and often I’ve even found data overlap from one source to the other. That being said, I’ve provided within this table 6 different charts based on the data that was provided and these are my key takeaways:

1) Despite being the minority population in the city, Black people were the overwhelming number of victims in this riot. In this dataset over 70% of those victimised were Black with less than 18% being white. The data on offenders has a lot more blindspots but even there we can see 33% of offenders are white and only 24% Black out of the cases where we know the races. One thing to note is it’s completely possible that the way I’ve chosen to label Offenders and Victims may bias the data. For instance, some might say that if an officer was threatened and had to shoot in self-defense then maybe he’s the victim. But in my view, if we scrub the words Offender and Victim of their moral weight we can fairly say the person who suffered the most damage in a one-dimensional way can be called the Victim and that to me is sufficient for this analysis.

2) The vast majority of both Victims and Offenders were Male. It seems that Females were either often avoided or sparsely involved in the events. Even when we look at pictures of the event it appears as over 80% of those participating are Male above all else. between this and the last point, it’s clear that Race was the dividing line, not Gender.

3) The location data is interesting because most of where these riots and assaults took place were areas where black and white neighbourhoods intersected. Places like Hastings St. where Blacks and Whites overlapped more than in other parts of town which were squarely Black or squarely White experienced the most violence.

4) Beyond race, the biggest offenders and the most common category was offences by police. Police Shootings were the greatest in the category of offences with Assaults (both by crowds and individuals) trailing 2nd place behind them. This is before even considering over categories of police offences such as police brutality and general harassment. I believe based on the readings that police were heavy-handed on Black “offenders” and often indifferent towards Black victims overall although I will recognise there are some genuine instances where police lives may have been threatened and they were forced to take action. It’s true that police is a job that puts you in situations where you’re more likely to experience the danger of bodily injury so that can explain why police are so overrepresented here despite being such a small part of the population but at the same time it’s hard to ignore accounts of interactions with the police from the Black community which showed a genuine bias and racial animosity from them. Even reports by the police / officials proved to be very biased in where they placed the blame so I’m inclined to say the police simply acted out of line in the vast majority of these cases based again on the readings and descriptions of individual cases. The fact is, Blacks were the minority of the city population and most of the rioters were white with many of the rowdiest ones being white based on this data. If the police were not biased you’d expect the statistics to be more equal between Black and white instances of police killings and even saying that is downplaying the extent to which it was skewed.

This analysis further solidifies the idea that this was a Race Riot but also it gave me perspective on just how bad it was for the Black population given that even the police seemed rigged against them.

Down below is a table of various dimensions which comprised the Detriot Riot of 1943 and a citation of the source used in the initial research for this project. The most clearly defined events in this source were the initial causes of tensions that caused this riot which consisted of racial animosity, discrimination, immigration, and a perceived encroachment by whites that blacks are somehow impeding on their communities. The source provided very good context not only to the background and underlying stresses in these communities but also a very thorough seemingly unbiased playback of what happened the day the riot broke out. In my estimation, the language used was not loaded, it was very clinical and descriptive.

Based on this initial research I would not label this event a Pogrom as that would imply a more organised effort to eradicate or expel a certain group even by officials. To call it a Rebellion or an Uprising is too much as it was not an attempt to overthrow the government and to call it a mere disturbance is too little given the scale of the event but rather this is a very clear-cut example of a Race Riot. This was a widespread series of civil disturbances across Detroit which resulted from racial animosity, clear causes rooted in racial discrimination and clear instances of violence taking place on the basis of race with racially charged rumours further fueling the flames. Based on this reading and my own research I’m inclined to say the violence was mostly committed against the black community, not entirely by them; but regardless the event clearly fits the label of Race Riot as outlined earlier in the course.

Source: Rucker, Walter C., and James N. Upton. Encyclopedia of American Race Riots. Greenwood Press, 2007.

This image was chosen as it conveys the spirit of the time which was the simple desire for civil equality & I chose the second because it demonstrates the unfortunate reality of tension and pushback.

Race Riots – Detroit, 1943