THE NATION

The Fire This Time

At midnight, Hubert G. Locke, a Negro who is administrative assistant to the police commissioner, left his desk at headquarters and climbed to the roof for a look at Detroit. When he saw it, he wept. Beneath him, whole sections of the nation's fifth largest city lay in charred, smoking ruins. From Grand River Avenue to Gratiot Avenue six miles to the east, tongues of flame licked at the night sky, illuminating the angular skeletons of gutted homes, shops, supermarkets. Looters danced in the eerie shadows, stripping a store clean, then setting it to the torch.

In the violent summer of 1967, Detroit became the scene of the bloodiest uprising in half a century and the costliest in terms of property damage in U.S. history. At week's end, there were 41 known dead, 347 injured, 3,800 arrested. Some 5,000 people were homeless (the vast majority Negro), while 1,300 buildings had been reduced to mounds of ashes and bricks and 2,700 businesses sacked. Damage estimates reached $500 million. The riot surpassed those that had preceded it in the summers of 1964 and 1965 and 1966 in a more fundamental way. For here was the most sensational expression of an ugly mood of nihilism and anarchy that has ever gripped a small but significant segment of America's Negro minority.

Typically enough, Detroit's upheaval started with a routine police action. Seven weeks ago, in the Virginia Park section of the West Side, a "blind pig" (afterhours club) opened for business on Twelfth Street, styling itself the "United Community League for Civic Action." Along with the booze that it offered to minors, the "League" served up black-power harangues against Whitey's exploitation.

At 1:45 a.m. Sunday, an informant, a wino and ex-convict, passed the word (and was paid 50-c- for it): "It's getting ready to blow." Two hours later, 10th Precinct Sergeant Arthur Howison led a raid on the League, arresting 73 Negro customers and the bartender. A crowd gathered, taunting the fuzz. "Just as we were pulling away," Howison said, "a bottle smashed a squad-car window."

Rocks and bottles flew. Looting, at first dared by only a few, became a mob delirium as big crowds now gathered. Arsonists lobbed Molotov cocktails at newly pillaged stores. Fires started in the shops, spread swiftly to homes and apartments. Snipers took up posts in windows and on rooftops. For four days and into the fifth, mobs stole, burned and killed as some 15,000 police, National Guardsmen and federal troops fought to smother the fire. The city was paralyzed.

END OF A PILGRIMAGE

Henry R. Luce: 1898-1967

"As a journalist," he once said, "I am in command of a small sector in the very front trenches of this battle for freedom." For Henry Robinson Luce, the battle ended last week. On the 44th anniversary of TIME'S first issue, America's greatest maker of magazines died in Phoenix of a coronary occlusion. He was 68. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.