Word: rioting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week, 324 years after the coming of the first Negroes in Virginia,† the strings of U.S. racial tension were taut and throbbing across the land. In jam-packed Detroit, where for 24 hours riot had raged (TIME, June 28), pent-up ill feeling between whites and Negroes was a silence more ominous than sound...
Whose Fault? Against this background, which was not too dissimilar from that of other war-crowded cities, Michigan's Governor Harry F. Kelly last week issued the report of a committee he had set up to determine the causes of Detroit's riot. Said the report, in a broad whitewash of the city's bumbling, do-nothing administration and incompetent police force...
...riot was not planned; was not inspired by enemy agents; resulted from smoldering racial tension. It was touched off by a rumor that a Negro woman and her child had been killed. "Irresponsible" white and Negro youths caused most of the casualties and property damage...
...this recitation of the most obvious facts, the report added a harsh indictment: prime responsibility for the riot lay at the door of the Negro leaders and the Negro press. Said the report: "Perhaps tension in Detroit is the positive exhortation by many so-called Negro leaders to be militant in the struggle for racial equality. . . . [Negro] newspapers repeatedly charge that there is no more democracy here than in Hitler's Europe or in Japan . . . the obvious purpose of which is to drive home to Negro readers the alleged fact of their servitude and to arouse a belligerent reaction...
From there, with a full cast of white and Negro actors, CBS went on to describe the riot dramatically, honestly. It told of the initial fight on the Belle Isle Bridge ("Listen, you get out of that car and I'll show you, you black. . . ."), the angry rumors and how they grew ("That black boy's quite a baby with his fists. . . ." "A baby thrown off the Belle Isle Bridge"), the bloodshed ("1,800 arrested . . . 600 injured ... 35 dead . . . the majority Negroes. . . ."). Then the program moved on to the causes of the riot...