Völkischer Beobachter (June 23, 1943)
23 Tote, über 709 Verletzte
Einer Reuter-Meldung aus Neuyork zufolge wurde vom Gouverneur des Staates Michigan in Detroit der Ausnahmezustand verhängt, weil bei Unruhen gegen Neger 23 Personen getötet und über 700 verletzt wurden.
Brooklyn Eagle (June 23, 1943)
Editorial: We can find in ourselves the cause of Detroit’s riots
Whenever there is an outbreak such as this week disgraced Detroit, there is a tendency for observers to hunt around for a scapegoat. A lot of people wonder if the rioting in Detroit wasn’t Axis-inspired.
That would be a simple explanation that would suggest a simple remedy. If we rooted out Axis propagandists, we’d have no more of such trouble.
The real explanation, perhaps unfortunately, is not so easy. Hitler doesn’t have to sow seeds of hate and prejudice and intolerance and just plain, mean cussedness in our hearts. We have a domestic growth of those things quite adequate to flower into something like the shameful crop harvested in Detroit.
Hitler must chortle over the news of race riots in Detroit and coal strikes in Pennsylvania, but let’s not kid ourselves that he starts those things. We do all right on our own.
Trouble is, we talk a better brand of democracy than we live. We get all choked up with emotion on the speaker’s platform and our voices tremble as we brag about our belief in the brotherhood of all men and equality of humanity. But when it comes down to cases we don’t ACT like brothers. We don’t even act like friends. We don’t have the honesty to admit our prejudices.
Detroit has boasted for years of the way its collections of foreign-born and its colonies of native-born Americans got along. It conveniently overlooked the fact that the newcomers brought their prejudices right along with their extra shirts. It overlooked the fact that the older residents had some hot prejudices of their own and that everyone who had lived in Detroit a year considered himself an old-timer and resented the arrival of anyone who came after him.
Detroit didn’t believe that what happened could happen. Mobs battled all of Sunday night but the authorities still, apparently, didn’t believe it could happen. That would seem to be the only reason why there was so long a delay before soldiers were called in.
No one believed that sooner or later the price of prejudice, of economic servitude, of the denial of ordinary rights would have to be paid. But it always does.