The 1967 Detroit uprising began at 9125 12th Street, now Rosa Parks Boulevard, in a second-floor room above a printing shop. By day it was the office of the United Community League for Civic Action. After hours it was a blind pig, an unlicensed bar, and before four on the morning of Sunday 23 July the police vice squad raided it. They expected a few customers and found more than eighty people at a party for servicemen back from Vietnam. Arresting everyone took time. While the patrol wagons came and went a crowd gathered on the warm, busy street, and a bottle was thrown. Bill Scott, the son of the man running the bar, later wrote that he threw it. By morning stores along 12th Street were being looted, and the first major fires followed that afternoon. Five days later 43 people were dead, more than 7,000 had been arrested, and there had been almost 1,700 fires. Federal paratroopers had been sent into an American city. Detroiters still argue over whether to call it a riot, a rebellion or an uprising, and the choice of word usually says where the speaker stood. Gordon Park now occupies the corner, at the intersection of Rosa Parks Boulevard and Clairmount.
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42.3765, -83.0996
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