Close to the Brink

For a time, it looked like the beginning of the 1967 riots all over again. The trouble started outside Bob Bolton's Bar and Grill in the Livernois-Fenkell section of Detroit. The bar's white owner, Andrew Chinarian, 39, claimed that he had caught Obie Wynn, 18, and two other black youths tampering with his car in the parking lot. As the trio tried to escape, said Chinarian, he fired at Wynn with a .25-cal. pistol and hit him in the back of the head. When word spread through the black community that Wynn was dead (he did not actually die until early the next morning), a crowd of 300 to 400 converged on the bar and began throwing bricks, setting fires, and looting stores in the neighborhood. In one episode, a group of black youths stopped a car at random, pulled out Marian Pyszko, a candy-factory worker on his way home, and bludgeoned him with a piece of concrete. Pyszko, 54, a Nazi concentration-camp survivor who emigrated from Poland in 1958, died three days later.

Detroit's black Mayor Coleman Young raced to the scene and spent the whole night trying to calm the crowds. So did a number of other officials and clergymen. Young also ordered in some 600 police, armed with riot helmets, nightsticks and tear gas, but under strict orders that "the use of fatal force [is] prohibited unless ... life is endangered." Not a shot was fired, and crowds dispersed at dawn.

The next day a rumor-control center was set up, and it coped with some 6,000 calls, but the most infuriating rumor proved true: Chinarian had been charged with second-degree murder and freed on $500 bond. Mayor Young called the bond "ridiculously low." Chinarian was later brought back to court and his bond was raised to $25,000. But another angry crowd had already gathered outside Bolton's bar, which was finally broken open and wrecked. By the next night Detroit police had again restored calm in the streets, still without firing a shot. In the 1967 rioting, 43 people died and property damage came to $64 million. This time two men were dead, 100 arrested, and property damage was comparatively minor. "We were pretty close to the brink," said Young, "[but] we're not going to let anybody tear up this city." Credit for that can go largely to Mayor Young himself.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.