JAMES R. SHIPLEY

AT 9 a.m. on Sunday the telephone rang in the home of Detroit Correspondent Joseph Kane. The call was from Ed Bailey, a Negro photographer who has excellent contacts in the city's Negro community. Bailey sounded shaken. "It's here, baby," he said.

Kane was about to take his family on a lakeside vacation and thought he might have to postpone his departure an hour or so, but no more, "because riots just don't happen here." He went down to Twelfth Street to take a look. When he saw the smoke on the horizon and heard the first eyewitness accounts of the early violence, Kane gave up all thought of the beach; he knew that he was in a war.

He tried walking two blocks toward the focal point of the riot, but "the eyes of the residents on their front porches seemed to radiate hatred. It was like walking through a corridor of statues with the kind of eyes that follow you wherever you go. Later I grew more confident and strolled the area with impunity--more or less. I made about seven trips among the rioters, perhaps to reassure myself that all this was really happening."

Reports Photographer Bailey: "One problem was that the mobs weren't exactly anxious to have their pictures taken showing them looting. They didn't want the cops to look at the press later and say, 'Oh, there's that guy.' I would say things like, 'Beautiful baby, beautiful . . . Man, where is the next action?' And usually I'd get by." But Kane and Bailey had a few close calls under sniper fire. At one point Bailey was hit in the back by a brick and his camera was taken away by an angry mob. Reinforcements appeared: Loye Miller and Dean Fischer came from TIME'S Chicago bureau and Wally Terry from Washington. Said Terry, who was recently in Viet Nam: "I felt in more danger in Detroit than I ever was over there." Adds Miller: "Maybe the worst hazards facing newsmen were not so much Negro threats or sniper bullets but the panicky reactions of National Guardsmen and police."

Also in Detroit was Artist Robert Templeton, who happened to have gone there to do some children's portraits. He drove into the action in his station wagon and, using the steering wheel as an easel, started sketching, with TIME'S cover in mind. He recalls: "Whenever I would get out of the car, they would throw bricks at me. I was such a target with that sketchbook! The brick or stone would hit that pastel and it would fly all over. I had gone through all of the TIME photos of Watts when I did the cover on Mayor Yorty of Los Angeles. Yet I wasn't prepared for the real thing. Detroit reminded me of Germany after World War II. Still, scared as you are, you know you're alive. It's exciting. On Tuesday I was back sketching children. Such a sharp contrast . It was hard."

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