The tensions I saw in 1967, depicted in the new film Detroit, are rising again

When she was just 13 years old, in 1976, Marsha Music’s father owned a record store and studio that recorded some of the most notable American blues and gospel of the 20th century. Artists who had graced the building included John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, and the very first gospel song recorded by the queen of soul, Aretha Franklin.

The family were forced to move when a freeway was built in the neighbourhood, and they relocated to 12th street in Detroit – just blocks away from where the civil unrest of 1967 would become the most violent and destructive disturbance in the US since the American civil war.

“I can remember the change in atmosphere on 12th as the younger black people had a sort of bristling energy that was very different than the old days,” Music recalls. “They were not going to take some of the humiliation and discrimination that had been endemic in the community for so long. There were rebellions happening all over the country. Everybody knew it was a matter of time before it happened in Detroit.”

Sitting in her bedroom back then, just as the cherry trees were beginning to fruit on her block, Music looked out the window and saw something she would never forget: a tank driving down the streets of Detroit.

With the police and national guard overwhelmed by five days of violence that would eventually claim the lives of 43 people, leave more than 1,000 injured and destroy 2,000 buildings, president Lyndon Johnson sent in the military to quell the disturbance. The unrest had been sparked when a welcome-home party for two black Vietnam veterans held in an after-hours drinking club – known colloquially as a “blind pig” – was raided by police. But the roots of the rage were much deeper.

Music’s shop was looted and eventually shattered, the mayhem perpetrated by both black and white people.

This violence is the backdrop to Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit, which focuses on the Algiers Motel incident, where three young black men were killed and others assaulted by white police officers who claimed to have acted in self-defence. The three white officers and a black security guard were all acquitted.

The film comes at a time when Detroit is experiencing a much touted, but limited, economic resurgence. At the same time, one in four homes in the city have been foreclosed upon, one in six homes have had their water disconnected in what the UN calls a “violation of human rights”, and the city sits in the single most racially segregated urban area in the US. It prompts the question, has much changed in 50 years?

Back then, Music says, “blacks were watching a horn of plenty in front of them, and were on the verge of being able to have a real engagement with the American dream. They were employed in the car factories, but couldn’t have higher paying jobs. They could live in decent housing, but couldn’t live where they wanted. We were on the cusp of equality, but were not there”.

Five decades on there are parallels, she says. “Today, you do have what I would call a potentially volatile situation, but the forms of that may be different. Because of the water shutoffs, because of the foreclosures. Those kind of situations I believe, in contrast to the wealth people see penetrating the city, is the type of juxtaposition that is ripe for conflict.”

The 1967 unrest is still so politically fraught that Detroiters cannot even decide what to call the events, referring to the disturbance as a riot, an uprising, or a rebellion.

A former Detroit police chief and deputy mayor Isaiah McKinnon is one of those who refers to 1967 as a rebellion – an uprising against the humiliation, iniquity, and brutality inflicted on African-Americans unabated since the beginning of slavery. McKinnon worked as an adviser to Bigelow’s film, and now is an associate professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, working to get young black men to pursue education and become teachers.

In his first year at high school, McKinnon had gone back to his middle school one day to thank a teacher for the impact on his life and was stopped by “the big four”, a group of four white policemen in a squad car. They severely beat him from his neck to his belt, in a procedure that was not uncommon for black men to endure back then.

He never told anybody, for fear he or his parents would be arrested for filing a complaint. But that night, he decided to become a Detroit police officer to effect change from within.

Before 1967, Detroit was considered a bastion of the black middle class and racial tolerance by many elites in politics and media. Wages for African-Americans were higher than average, Detroit had the highest rate of black homeownership in the nation, and the mayor, Jerome Cavanagh, famously said just weeks before the disturbances that citizens don’t “need to throw a brick to communicate with city hall”.

“The assumption was everyone was happy,” McKinnon said. “The reality was that was not the truth.”

McKinnon was in his second year on the force when the disturbance in 1967 erupted. One of about 75 black police officers at the time – in a force that was about 93% white – he was assigned to the precinct at the epicentre. While driving home one night, still in uniform and wearing his badge, he was stopped by two white police officers.

Upon approaching the car, the lead officer held a gun to his head and said, “Tonight you’re going to die nigger”, and began to pull the trigger. Speeding away in his mustang convertible, pushing the accelerator with his right hand and steering with the other, the officers shot at him as he drove for his life. McKinnon filed a complaint with his sergeant, but the extent of the investigation was, “Ike, we got some assholes out there.”

“If these guys are behaving this way to me, a fellow law enforcement officer,” McKinnon says, “what are they gonna do to people in the street?”

In an independent survey conducted by the Detroit Free Press newspaper in the aftermath of the 1967 events, far and away the number one cause that respondents said drove the destruction – behind housing segregation, employment discrimination, and abuse in shops among other humiliations – was mistreatment by police.

Although the Detroit police department has vastly improved its diversity, now more than half of the force is African American, the US has recently seen a rash of large civil disturbances following incidents of alleged police misconduct, including in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland.

And although there have been no large public disturbances in Detroit since 1967, the city had its own turmoil in recent years when seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed by a bullet from a police machine gun during a “no-knock” raid (where officers enter a property without notifying the residents) at her home. Claiming the girl’s grandmother grabbed the gun before it went off, the white officer who fired the bullet was acquitted.

“The whole question of police brutality is very active,” says novelist and playwright Pearl Cleage.

Home in Detroit from Howard University at the time of the 1967 unrest, Cleage rode out the disturbance at her mother’s. She remembers seeing the homes of friends burning, and went to high school with Aubrey Pollard, one of the men later killed at the Algiers Motel, depicted in Bigelow’s film.

Her father, Albert Cleage, a prominent separatist minister, was “on the side of the civil rights movement that was not advocating non-violent protest ... [like Malcolm X] he understood the necessity for self-defence”.

Just over a month after the unrest, the elder Cleage convened a “people’s tribunal” at his church, Central United Church of Christ. The mock trial examined the events and the three white officers and black security guard ultimately acquitted for the murders. Civil rights icon Rosa Parks and prominent novelist John O Killens sat on the jury that convicted the men. “It was electric. The atmosphere was just rage and sorrow and anger at what was happening, and that we didn’t seem to be able to protect ourselves and to get a police force and a mayor who were on the side of the black people in Detroit.”

Cleage says she sees vast similarities to what is happening now with the killings of young black men by police. “Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, all of those people are black men killed by police in questionable circumstances – and that’s putting it mildly, questionable – it’s the same feeling of absolute frustration at our inability to protect ourselves from the people who are supposed to be protecting us. The same problems with the police exist, and the same problems with the social issues around it.”

She refers to a speech Donald Trump gave recently to a group of officers in which he urged them to be “rough” and “not too nice” with suspects: “To have the president of the country say that’s what we need to do, and have a room full of police officers applaud that, that doesn’t lead any place but a feeling of, ‘Well, we got nothing to lose.’ And that’s where the riots come from. A feeling of, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s just burn it all up.”