Across the United States, the 1960s and 1970s were a time of change. Social activism including anti-war, feminist, environmental, and civil rights movements gained momentum. Building on the civil rights actions of the 1950s, Black Americans organized behind community leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X. People across the country participated in protests, sit-ins, and boycotts, and around 250,000 joined King’s March on Washington in 1963. The same year, a march he led in Detroit brought similar numbers. While these protests forced important political progress, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, urban Black residents remained disadvantaged. Frustration over the slow pace of progress and the lack of social and economic justice led to the growth of the Black Power Movement. Uprisings in dozens of US cities in 1963 were met with police brutality and military responses that galvanized the Black power movement and led to the growth of the Black Panther Party in 1966. “Race riots” broke out across the country, and in 1967, Detroit saw some of its greatest civil unrest during the five days that became known as the Detroit Race Riots, Detroit Rebellion, or Detroit Uprising. Two years later, the Rouge River caught fire. Like the thousands of Black Detroiters calling for justice, the river’s own cries for help went largely ignored for years, resulting in flames and destruction.
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How the Black Power Movement Influenced the Civil Rights Movement | HISTORY
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Detroit in the 1960s remained much as it had in the previous decade. Some Black families purchased homes in Black neighborhoods, while pioneers into white neighborhoods faced racial violence. Generally, they remained restricted to low-quality, over-crowded, and high-rent buildings.
Detroit’s economy continued to decline as automation replaced human labor and industries left the city. Between 1958 and 1982, 187,000 jobs left the city.○ Work remained segregated, and young Black Detroiters faced high rates of unemployment.○ By the end of the 1960s, 19.7% of Black autoworkers were unemployed, in contrast to only 5.8% of white autoworkers.○
Frustration over inadequate housing, high unemployment, decades of violence, and the lack of real change eventually culminated in widespread civil disorder. A police raid in an underground bar sparked the 1967 unrest. The violence lasted for five days, involved over 17,000 troops, killed 43, injured over 1,000, and destroyed over 1,000 buildings.○ During the uprising, paranoia over potential “snipers” encouraged the indiscriminate shooting of Black people by police. The Algiers Motel shootings became the most infamous example of this.○ Widespread accusations of brutality by the overwhelmingly white police force and federal troops damaged relations between the Black community and law enforcement, and played a part in the 1974 election of Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, who advocated fiercely for an integrated police force.○
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By the 1960s, decades of unregulated industrial dumping culminated in a river in desperate need of help. Environmentalists strove to limit toxic waste in the river, while civil engineers strove to control the river’s floods with concrete. Caught in the crossfire were the boats that rusted in sulfuric acid and fish without oxygen, food, or shelter.
Read the quotation Michigan Congressman John Dingell used to described the Rouge to Congress in 1966 here.
In the hearing, Dingell reported a daily dose of 19,000 gallons of oil, 200,000 pounds of sulfuric acid, 2,000,000 pounds of chemical salts, and 100,000 pounds of iron entering the Rouge.○ At the time, the Army Corps of Engineers was removing 255,000 cubic yards of waste from the bottom of the river annually.○ Attempts at regulation faced stiff opposition from industrial polluters. When confronted about its contribution of wood solids and chemicals to the Rouge, the Scott Paper Co. in Detroit threatened to move its operations—and jobs—elsewhere if it would not be allowed to continue dumping into the Rouge.○ Coupled with raw sewage from frequent combined sewer overflows, the levels of pollution led some local health officials to ban human contact with the river in 1969.○
Then, in October of 1969, the Rouge caught fire when sparks from a welding torch ignited some floating debris. The flames spread to a 3,000-gallon oil spill in the river that flowed from a broken pipe earlier that day.○ Despite the paradox of burning water, this fire was not front-page news: a local paper devoted only three short columns to the story, tucked deep within the issue. In the 1960s, a Rust Belt river catching fire was not particularly noteworthy. These rivers received the waste of industrial growth, meaning that sometimes, they caught fire.
The Rouge saw another major change beginning in the 1960s. In 1962, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers started straightening and channelizing the final miles of the river to prevent flooding in downstream communities. A straight river with wide, concrete banks allows for excess water to safely fill and exit the system quickly. This stretch, originally 5.8 miles, was shortened to 4.2 miles as engineers eliminated natural meanders and lined the river with concrete.○ While effective in reducing flooding, the project also destroyed huge amounts of habitat. Sediment, rocks, and plants that lined the riverbed disappeared under concrete. Without food or places to hide, Great Lakes fish struggled to move through the channelized section and into the Rouge.
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Just a moment...
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Photo credit:
By U.S. Army Corps of Engineers via wikipediaExplore this map activity to see how the shape and path of the Rouge River has changed over the last century.
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Both the city’s people and its river, after enduring years of abuse and neglect, ended the 1960s in flames. It became increasingly clear that both were victims of a system that long prioritized profit and power over the equitable treatment of the landscape and its people. Black Detroiters faced environmental inequalities alongside social and economic ones. While white Detroiters moved out of the crowded city and into homes in new suburbs, de jure and de facto discriminatory practices kept Black Detroiters inside the city. With minimal greenspace, Black Detroiters were trapped in a concrete jungle fed by a toxic river. When a regional park system developed between the 1940s and the 1960s, the committee in charge of establishing parks within and around the city spent most of its resources developing greenspaces in the suburbs, while Detroit taxpayers footed most of the bill.○
The Rouge, completely unrecognizable as a river downstream, continued to be viewed as one thing: a cog in the machine of progress. Its importance as an ecosystem with unique services to all the life in and around its banks was not valued by human developers. After severely impairing the Rouge’s natural flood control system in previous decades, developers dealt with the consequences by further altering the river. The story of the Rouge and Detroit in the 1960s is a clear example of environmental racism that would take decades to even begin to address.