A blind pig on 12th Street is raided; the city is burning by dawn

By 1967, Detroit's black residents faced a police force where nearly half its officers in black neighborhoods were rated "extremely anti-Negro," alongside redlined housing and unemployment double the white rate. Early Sunday, July 23, police raided an unlicensed after-hours bar on 12th Street where 85 people were celebrating two local GIs back from Vietnam. A crowd gathered outside as police made arrests, then looting began at the shoe store next door, and it spread down the block. Five days later, 43 were dead, over 7,200 arrested, and more than 400 buildings destroyed, the worst American riot since the Civil War draft riots of 1863…