metro »

Historical Photos Courtesy of Kenneth Stahl

continued from page 14

The rioters he represented all pled
guilty to vandalism and most were sen-
tenced to probation. “Everybody had
sympathy for the rioters,” Cohn says. “We
realized the anger that was there and the
social dislocation that occurred.”

Sandra Svoboda

AFTER THE RIOTS
Cohn took a seat on the newly formed
police commission after the riot, where
he supported a program of quotas for the
police department.
“For every white, hire a black, for every
female, hire a male,” he says. “I resigned
from the American Jewish Committee
because they were opposed to quotas. But
I believe that if you didn’t have a police
department that reflected the makeup of
the community, it would be looked upon
as an army of occupation.”
Levin turned to politics to make a
difference in justice. He was elected in
1969 to the Detroit City Council and took
office in 1970.
“A number of people had urged me to
run as someone who could get support
from both the black and white communi-
ties, also because of my work in poverty
law, they thought I could be part of the
healing of Detroit,” Levin says. “Being
Jewish was a big plus when I ran for City
Council.”
He came in third out of nine city coun-
cil members. Four years later, he became
president of the Detroit City Council.
During his tenure, hiring factors in the
Detroit Police Department changed sig-
nificantly, creating a work force that more
closely resembled the city’s population.
He had very strong support from the
Jewish community. “There have always
been very strong connections between
the Jewish and black communities,” he
says. “I think there still is a strong con-
nection. The Jewish community has
always strongly supported civil rights.”
Goodman’s experience during the
Rebellion, he says,
led him to his life’s
work of helping to
maintain civil rights
and constitutional
liberties for countless
Americans. He spent
many years in New
York as the legal direc-
tor at the Center for
Constitutional Rights,
Bill Goodman where he represented
Vietnam veterans who
were victims of Agent
Orange, the wrongfully convicted and
detainees at Guantanomo Bay, to name
just a few. He returned to the Detroit area

The
Intersection
Project

16 April 21 • 2016

Guardsmen patrolling Mack Avenue after the Army pulled out

Walter Klein, in April 1967, reported on the
Neighborhoods Sub-Committee meeting with
information of a number of Jewish merchants in the
inner-city areas. The purpose of that committee
now centered on determining the source and extent
of tensions or problems between Jewish merchants
and black clientele. Most agreed that whatever
diffi culties were identifi able appeared unrelated to
their being Jewish.

(from Harmony & Dissonance: Voices of Jewish Identity in Detroit)

in 2007, opening Goodman and Hurwitz
in Detroit with Julie Hurwitz.
Miller continued to pursue a strategy
to encourage structural reform as chair-
man of the Legal Redress Committee
of the NAACP. “I decided not to bring
lawsuits because then they could always
buy their way out of it,” he says. “That
would have diverted attention from the
issue itself — structural reform in the
police department. Getting discipline, no
matter how small, was better than getting
dollars.”
Miller continued with the NAACP for a
while until there was a change in leader-
ship with the rise of the black militant
movement. “I was always an integration-
ist, so I didn’t fit in,” Miller says.

JEWISH COMMUNITY RESPONSE
Before the riots, the Jewish and black
communities’ relationship was largely in
the purview of the Jewish Community

Council (now the JCRC), Cohn recalls.
“As a result of the riots, concern about
the relationship among blacks and
Jews as well as the general population
became the responsibility of the Jewish
Federation itself,” Cohn says. “A special
committee was appointed by Federation’s
board of governors. Alan E. Schwartz was
chairman of that committee, and I was a
member. We tried to set up a dialogue.
“The African American community
complained there were no black doctors
on the staff at Sinai Hospital. They talked
about employment. Black physicians got
their staff positions quickly,” Cohn con-
tinues. “We looked at ways to enhance
the betterment of the underprivileged,
mainly the black community.”
The day after the riots started, a group
of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish leaders
met to establish the Interfaith Emergency
Council. Shortly after, civic leaders
formed New Detroit, a private citizen’s

council focused on urban renewal. Max
Fisher was the only Jewish person tapped
to join the committee. Within months,
Jewish leaders Stanley Winkelman, Mel
Ravitz, Alan Schwartz and Norman
Drachler also joined.
More than half the Jewish businesses
in the Seven Mile-Livernois area and
12th Street neighborhood fled the city,
including Stanley Lipson who owned
Sam Lipson’s Variety Store on 12th Street,
which was looted and burned. Ironically,
Lipson had long attempted (unsuccessful-
ly) to form a biracial merchants’ associa-
tion. It’s unclear why his attempt failed.

COULD IT HAPPEN AGAIN?
In the wake of civil uprisings in places
like Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md.,
largely sparked by police violence against
African Americans, one has to wonder if
another riot could happen in Detroit.
Not likely, according to Levin. “The
city is on an upswing,” he says. “There is
positive momentum and such incredible
good will in the city, a feeling that we
have a real turnaround. Young people are
moving into the city who’ve overcome
racial and other divisions that existed in
our society.”
Not that Levin thinks everything is
rosy. “I don’t want to suggest that there
are not problems. There are. We still have
huge black unemployment in the city,
especially with black youth. There’s still
a problem with criminal justice in the
black community, as it relates to mari-
juana arrests and incarceration.”
Miller doesn’t think the problems
Detroit faces today are a function of rac-
ism. “I think you have a very depressed
community within parts of the city that
are really not part of the community any-
more. They are not anchored to society
or any social norms,” Miller says. “The
cops have the difficult job of maintaining
order in the community, and they don’t
have respect for these people, but that’s
not essentially racist.”
Cohn agrees. “I doubt seriously that
this could happen again. If it did, it
wouldn’t be because of black-white rela-
tionships but rather a frustrated under-
privileged class. But everyone is so much
more alert now.”

*

Historical data was taken from Harmony &
Dissonance: Voices of Jewish Identity in Detroit
by Sidney Bolkosky (Wayne State University Press,
1991); Metropolitan Jews by Lila Corwin Berman
(University of Chicago Press, 2015); Hurt Baby Hurt
by Walter William Scott (Ghetto Press, 1970); and The
Great Rebellion: A Socio-economic Analysis of the
1967 Detroit Riot by Kenneth Stahl (2009).

Nearly 50 years after a police raid at 12th and Clairmount streets ignited violence and carnage, the Detroit Journalism Cooperative, which includes the
Detroit Jewish News, is exploring whether conditions that produced the civil unrest have improved for Detroit residents in a series of stories called The
Intersection. Look for future stories from the JN on this project throughout 2016. To see all the stories done by our partner media agencies, go to wdet.
org/series/detroit-journalism-cooperative.

