Waging Cold War in a Model City: The Investigation of "Subversive" Influences in the 1967 Detroit Riot

Abstract

One year after the Detroit riot of July 1967, an African-American newspaper, the Michigan Chronicle, charged that the city's administration had failed to address the root causes of Detroit's civil unrest, which left forty-three people dead, city neighborhoods devastated, and Detroit's already tense state of race relations further inflamed. In its February 1968 headline, the Chronicle argued 'Containment,' Not Prevention Is Now City's Only Concern.1 As historian Elaine Tyler May argues, the rhetoric of guided American foreign policy and reverberated in the domestic sphere during the 1950s. She notes that the domestic anticommunist movement was one type of containment: If presumably subversive individuals could be contained and prevented from spreading their poisonous influence through the body politic, then the society could feel secure.2 Anticommunism was not the only form of containment, however. Indeed, containment could also be perceived as a metaphor for social control of all ideological and physical forces deemed potentially destructive or subversive. As I will illustrate, containment became an imperative goal for politicians of every