The Kercheval Incident, Detroit 1966

Story design by Francesca Ferrara, Caroline Levine, and Matt Lassiter; based on the Detroit Under Fire exhibit section  "Radicalization and Civil Protest,"  researched and written by Jesse Blumberg, Hannah Thoms, and Matt Lassiter.

In August 1966, Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers arrested three young Black men for "loitering" outside the Kercheval Ave. headquarters of the Afro-American Youth Movement, a Black Power organization at the center of the city's anti-police brutality activism. The confrontation was the latest in an organized and illegal DPD campaign of harassment, criminalization, surveillance, and infiltration of the Afro-American Youth Movement and its parent group, the Adult Community Movement for Equality (ACME-AAYM). The crackdown sparked four days of unrest and conflict between the DPD, which mobilized with extreme militarization, and Black residents of the East Side neighborhood. The DPD, the city government, and the Wayne County prosecutor labeled this event the "Kercheval Mini-Riot" and used it as a pretext to crush the Afro-American Youth Movement.

“What happened was a response on the part of an oppressed people to the most obvious form of their oppression: the police department. What happened was not spontaneous in that it was set off by a single incident. What happened was the result of years of oppression" -- Alvin Harrison, director of the Afro-American Youth Movement, August 1966

Alvin Harrison, the new leader of the Afro-American Youth Movement,  accurately blamed  years of racist oppression by the Detroit Police Department for setting off the conflict that came to be known as the "Kercheval Incident." But there is a remarkable twist to this story, documented for the first time in this investigative report and  even more extensively  on the Detroit Under Fire website. The FBI and the DPD definitely had at least one, and probably several, undercover agents and informants who had infiltrated ACME-AAYM and deliberately sought to "incite a riot" by "advocating violence"--the charges used in the successful legal campaign to destroy the anti-police brutality organization after the so-called "Kercheval Mini-Riot." There is very strong archival evidence that Alvin Harrison himself was one of those undercover "agent provocateurs," as these FBI infiltrators were called. Frank Joyce, a Detroit civil rights activist involved in exposing the police department's role in instigating the Kercheval Incident, told our project in a  2019 interview  that he and other former members of ACME-AAYM have all come to believe that "Al Harrison is our number one suspect for being an agent."

"On this day, Black people took an important stand against the police occupation of their community"--Frank Joyce, founder of the Adult Community Movement for Equality, 2019

The secret role of law enforcement in instigating the Kercheval Incident does not change the larger significance of the event, when "Black people took an important stand against the police occupation of their community," the verdict that Frank Joyce believes should be on a historical marker outside the former ACME-AAYM headquarters (no marker currently exists). But this revelation does help explain how the radical activism of civil rights organizations in 1960s Detroit escalated in direct response to the DPD's illegal war on the city's Black Power movement, its systemic violence in targeted Black neighborhoods, and its unconstitutional retaliatory abuses against Black community activists who protested police brutality.

The Kercheval Incident is generally remembered today as the 'near miss' that lulled Detroit's white leadership into a false sense of complacency that the city would be able to prevent a race riot, a comfortable liberal illusion proved devastatingly wrong by the  Detroit Uprising  of July 1967. This interpretation is true, but it also misses the greater historical significance of the Kercheval Incident--the first major operation in a  revanchist campaign  by the Detroit Police Department between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s to destroy the city's Black Power movement. While this  unconstitutional and violent campaign  to maintain white power over Detroit's Black neighborhoods did not ultimately win out, it did successfully cause the radical anti-police brutality movement led by the ACME-AAYM organizations to disintegrate.

It was 1966. White liberals from the White House to the mayor's office had made promises to help improve the lives of African Americans in Detroit. President Lyndon B. Johnson had recently declared a national War on Poverty and a simultaneous  War on Crime , and Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh  did the same  at the local level. Middle-class African Americans saw anti-poverty programs as the answer to making Detroit safer. Despite this, the Detroit Police Department (DPD) was 95% white, police brutality was widespread, and many African Americans remained frustrated, especially in the city's working-class and poor neighborhoods. As the 1960s progressed, civil rights organizers adopted more confrontational strategies and a growing number of Black citizens embraced a more radical approach, in Detroit and across the nation.

Their answer: the ideology of Black Power.

CORE (Congress for Racial Equality), a major national civil rights organization, sent out a letter in 1966 calling for the endorsement of Black Power. The letter denounced both the white racists in the South, and the white racists in the urban North, where civil rights protests to achieve a national fair-housing law had run into massive opposition.

In fact, two-thirds of white voters in Detroit had supported a  segregationist ordinance in 1964  to guarantee their right to discriminate based on race in the sale and rental of housing. The courts ruled the ordinance unconstitutional, but its passage revealed the depth of white Detroit's support for racial segregation and discrimination--attitudes that also prevailed in the  almost all-white  police department.

CORE noted six key purposes of Black Power: political power, economic power, Black pride, development of Black leadership, federal intervention to curb racist local law enforcement, and consumer power.

SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), the leading organization for young Black activists in the South, also embraced Black Power in 1966 under the leadership of its chairman, Stokely Carmichael. This was significant for Detroit's history, as explained in more detail below, because the ACME-AAYM organization that led the city's anti-police brutality protests during 1965-1966 began as an affiliate of SNCC as part of its expansion into the urban North. Detroit also had other important civil rights activists who had long advocated a version of Black Power, including the Reverend Albert Cleague, Jr., who helped organize major  anti-brutality protests  against the DPD in 1963.

In Detroit, the local chapters of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the Urban League rejected the Black Power philosophy, as did their national organizations. They feared that calls for Black Power would divide the civil rights movement, scare white liberal allies, and bring about a racist backlash. Below, Roy Wilkins, the head of the national NAACP, criticizes Black Power in a 1966 editorial. Note his warning that Black Power might result in an "indiscriminate crack-down by law officers under the ready-made excuse of restoring law and order."

"The police do represent to Negroes the historical effort of the white 'power structure' to keep the Negro in an inferior position" -- Michigan Civil Rights Commission, 1964

Detroit's white leadership had plenty of warnings that the Black Power movement was coming, especially because of the growing anger in poor Black neighborhoods against the brutal tactics of law enforcement. In this  1964 memorandum , the Michigan Civil Rights Commission alerted urban mayors and police chiefs that the racial violence and unrest that had already happened in Harlem and other segregated Black "ghettos" was likely to come to Detroit and other Michigan cities as well, and that police brutality would be the likely cause.

Instead of reforming the police department, Mayor Cavanagh's administration responded to increased civil rights activism and protests through  "get tough" policies  that included expanded racial profiling and the creation of the militarized Tactical Mobile Unit (TMU) as a "deterrent force." The TMU unit alone  stopped and frisked  more than 150,000 people each year without cause, the vast majority of them African American. The TMU had the further responsibility of controlling "demonstrations of various types," meaning civil rights protests.

The Cavanagh administration also enacted an  "anti-loitering" law  to give police the discretionary authority to arrest anyone in public for any reason at any time. The DPD also escalated its  political surveillance operations --a secret, unconstitutional program to spy on civil rights groups and left-wing organizations--in response to the surge of Black activism in the mid-1960s.

All of these punitive policies--racial profiling, discretionary harassment, TMU militarization, illegal surveillance, systematic coverups of police brutality--helped inspire Black Power radicalism and also played a direct role in the Kercheval Incident of August 1966.

In this excerpt of four interviews, longtime Black activists from Detroit discuss the DPD's racial profiling tactics, the Tactical Mobile Unit, and other ways that the police department "terrorized and brutalized" Black citizens during the punitive escalation of the mid-to-late 1960s.

In the mid-1960s, younger activists began forming new community-based organizations to fight against racial discrimination in Detroit through direct-action protests. This approach had a long history in radical civil rights and labor movements in the Motor City, but it also represented a departure from the strategies of establishment groups such as the NAACP and the Detroit Urban League, which focused on negotiating reform with the liberal Cavanagh administration.

The Afro-American Youth Movement (AAYM), the Black Power organization at the center of the Kercheval Incident, emerged from this combination of escalating police crackdowns and radical grassroots activism in the mid-1960s. But this was a winding path, because the AAYM's origins as Detroit's leading Black Power organization in the movement against police brutality actually can be traced back to 1962. That year, white and black civil rights activists in Detroit started a chapter of the Northern Student Movement (NSM), a coalition affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the college-based organization leading the sit-ins and other direct-action protests in the South. Black activists involved with the Detroit NSM chapter soon started an offshoot organization, the Adult Community Movement for Equality (ACME), in order to help organize poor Black communities facing discrimination in housing, employment, school, and law enforcement. ACME argued that police brutality was part of a broader system of racial oppression of poor Black communities and  proclaimed :

"We believe that those institutions which perpetuate racism also perpetuate poverty, slums, inadequate education, citizens' powerlessness. . . . We believe that the poor must become involved in this process of change' it is they who are oppressed and must end their oppression" -- Adult Community Movement for Equality, 1965

In 1965, the Adult Community Movement for Equality launched an anti-police brutality direct-action campaign that led to an escalating series of confrontations with the Detroit Police Department and ultimately to the Kercheval Incident of August 1966. The police response to ACME's civil rights activism reveals striking similarities between segregationist state violence in the Jim Crow South and in the urban North, a point ACME made often, including in this flyer:

ACME was a majority-Black community organization with a biracial leadership located on the East Side of Detroit. The organization recruited members including "welfare mothers, factory workers, unemployed men and women, and housewives." Very few had ever been involved in civil rights activism before. ACME's goal was to empower "indigenous leaders" on behalf of the "Negro majority," not just the traditional concerns of the middle-class civil rights organizations.

In 1964 and 1965, ACME surveyed the residents of its East Side neighborhood to determine what their priorities were for political activism and protests. So many people chose the "police brutality" option (document at left) that ACME realized that this campaign would have to be at the center of its agenda--although the group also continued to register voters and hold demonstrations outside businesses that refused to hire Black employees.

ACME began smaller-scale activism against police brutality with plans to launch a major campaign in the summer of 1965.

Frank Joyce was a white civil rights activist in Detroit who co-founded the original Northern Student Movement chapter, which provided a base of support for ACME. In this interview excerpt, he talks about bringing the SNCC-affiliated movement to Detroit and how working directly with the Black community on the East Side radicalized him and other white members of the organization. These experiences, along with the roles of local Black activists who had grown up on the East Side, inspired ACME's shift to leading a full-time anti-police brutality movement in 1965.

ACME passed out these cards to measure the extent of police misconduct and brutality experienced by Black residents of Detroit's East Side. The cards also encouraged people to contact ACME if they suffered mistreatment by any law enforcement agency, including the courts and prosecutor, and stated its goal to turn the East Side into a "self-governed community."

On July 1, 1965, ACME published the results from the police misconduct survey in its newsletter. The survey revealed that a majority of Black people who responded had criminal records, and that the vast majority of these police encounters were for discretionary low-level offenses that would never be enforced in a middle-class white neighborhood. This demonstrates that the DPD engaged in racial criminalization--in essence creating crime through racially targeted law enforcement--rather than fighting crime itself. Other responses represented explicitly illegal police actions.

• 51% had received a jaywalking ticket
• 30% had received a loitering ticket
• 51% had been "illegally arrested"
• 71% had been stopped and frisked by the police without probable cause
• 68% had been verbally abused by a police officer
• 29% had been beaten by a police officer
• 29% had illegally been held overnight in jail without charges (a common, unconstitutional DPD policy of making " investigative arrests " of alleged crime suspects)
• 48% had seen police officers ignore crimes in progress (a common complaint in Detroit's Black neighborhoods was that the police harassed law-abiding citizens but did not protect them from crime)
• 47% said they knew about police officers taking bribes

The survey confirmed ACME's belief that police misconduct and brutality was one of the most urgent issues facing the Black community in Detroit--especially poor Black neighborhoods that did not generally file complaints with the middle-class oriented NAACP.

The Detroit Police Department began harassing and arresting ACME members almost immediately after its formation, even before the group decided to make police brutality its top priority. DPD officers stopped and frisked ACME activists as they drove their cars or ventured outside, at times arresting them for loitering. They placed ACME under surveillance and then repressed the group during direct-action protests. At least once, DPD officers raided the ACME headquarters on a pretext and tossed the building.

In this segment from a 2019 interview with our project, NSM co-founder and ACME supporter Frank Joyce recalls this police harassment and divides it into two categories: racial profiling and mistreatment suffered by ACME members as part of everyday life as Black people living on the East Side, and targeted repression of ACME activists because of their political beliefs and activities.

The DPD often used the city's  vague anti-loitering law  to criminalize and arrest ACME members for their political activities. In 1964, the police department successfully lobbied for the anti-loitering law in order to legalize its longstanding practice of making unconstitutional "investigative arrests." In 1965, the DPD arrested Moses Wedlow, a leading ACME activist, for 'loitering' on the sidewalk in a clear case of political repression for his civil rights work.  Wedlow challenged  the anti-loitering law as unconstitutional, with the assistance of the ACLU, but the courts rejected his lawsuit.

In another 1965 incident, DPD officers arrested Wedlow for allegedly driving without a license, and then arrested seven other ACME members who held a protest at the precinct station. ACME charged the police with brutalizing its members inside the station house. The DPD denied the story and blamed ACME for abusing police officers and causing the conflict. Read about this case below in the Michigan Chronicle, Detroit's Black weekly newspaper.

"The majority of white policemen see their job not as protecting the community from criminals, but rather as protecting the white community from the Negro community" -- ACME, 1965

In 1965, ACME filed an  extensive complaint  against the Detroit Police Department detailing the major incidents of politically motivated harassment against its members for the past two years. The document accused white DPD officers of waging a segregationist war in opposition to civil rights activism by criminalizing constitutionally protected activities, just as happened in the South.

This interactive map displays civil rights protests and incidents of DPD harassment and repression of the Adult Community Movement for Equality, its parent organization the Northern Student Movement, and its spin-off group the Afro-American Youth Movement, between 1964-1966. Explore by hovering over the dots. Zoom to view the cluster of incidents around ACME's East Side headquarters, and around two different police precincts. The dark blue represents the most racially segregated Black neighborhoods in Detroit.

• Black dots = ACME/AAYM protests against DPD
• Red dots = Police harassment of ACME/AAYM members (mainly false arrests)
• Yellow dots = Police brutality against ACME-AAYM

This map shows the number of loitering tickets given out in each Detroit Police Department precinct during 1965, when the DPD crackdown on ACME intensified. The DPD issues by far the most loitering tickets (737) in the 5th Precinct (far right on Detroit's East Side), the station closest to ACME headquarters. This indicates that DPD policies were not about fighting crime or protecting the Black community, but rather fighting the civil rights movement and criminalizing anti-police brutality activists. (The DPD's issuance of yet more loitering tickets to ACME members is what set off the Kercheval Incident, as shows in Part III below).

ACME held many rallies and demonstrations against police brutality during the summer of 1965, including several that escalated after the police harassed and escalated ACME members when they were protesting against property owners who engaged in housing and employment discrimination. One major protest involved the Seyburn Incident, when white police officers began beating a 19-year-old Black male during a traffic stop. The encounter happened near the ACME headquarters, and several members went over to investigate after a crowd gathered. The police ordered the ACME activists and the rest of the crowd to disperse and then arrested three of the group's leaders: Frank Joyce, Al Harrison, and Courtney Cox. The DPD reported the event as a near-riot by a Black "mob," which was a fabrication. ACME held multiple protests over the police brutality in the Seyburn Incident, including the one advertised in the flyer below, and  compared the Detroit Police Department  to the white segregationists in Mississippi.

"The police department has for years engaged in summary arrests on trumped-up charges, treatment of those arrested with arrogance and brutality, and they use their guns recklessly. . . . The parallel between Detroit and Mississippi in this respect is appallingly close" -- ACME/Northern Student Movement after the Seyburn Incident, July 1965

In spring 1966, as part of the rise of Black Power, ACME split into two organizations, paralleling what happened nationally with SNCC. Frank Joyce and other white members founded a group called Friends of NSM, later renamed People Against Racism. The Black leaders of ACME took charge of an offshoot organization that remained in its Kercheval headquarters: the Afro-American Youth Movement. Both groups continued to participate in anti-police brutality activism.

"The police harass, insult, humiliate and brutalize members of the Black community. . . . We must use whatever means necessary to protect ourselves and our community" -- Afro-American Youth Movement, May 1966

In May, the Afro-American Youth Movement launched a major campaign against the Detroit Police Department after the shooting of Thomas Baker, a 16-year-old Black male, right outside its headquarters in the ACME building at 9211 Kercheval Avenue.

Baker was wounded by a bullet from a car driven by two white males who called out “hey” before firing one shot and speeding away. He was taken to Detroit General Hospital with a bullet wound in his left shoulder.

The AAYM released a report on the shooting (left) and promised to defend the Black community by "whatever means necessary" from both the DPD and white racist vigilantes. The DPD accused ACME of fabricating the incident and causing Baker's injury.

The DPD  investigative report  of the Thomas Baker shooting accused the youth of being a juvenile criminal and making up the story about being shot by the car of white males. Read it below:

The Thomas Baker shooting occurred a month before the new SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael issued his famous  call for Black Power  during a march in Mississippi. Carmichael did so after being arrested for the 27th time for participating in nonviolent civil rights protests--the same type of criminalization and segregationist mistreatment that the Detroit Police Department unleashed on the SNCC-affiliated activists in ACME and the Afro American Youth Movement.

The police coverup of the Thomas Baker shooting escalated the tensions with the Black Power activists in the AAYM. Alvin Harrison, the new AAYM leader, accused the DPD of fabricating the story to frame his organization. Harrison also accused the DPD or brutalizing and even murdering Black people in Detroit and said that AAYM would "take any steps necessary" for self defense. Read AAYM's response to the Baker shooting below as covered in the radical Fifth Estate newspaper and the Black weekly, the Michigan Chronicle.

In 1965, a mainstream civil rights coalition in Detroit labeled the East Side neighborhood bounded by Kercheval and McClellan Avenues to be a “danger spot” and a possible source of racial trouble. The segregated neighborhood was one of the poorest in the city and its residents lacked access to adequate housing, jobs, recreational facilities, and social welfare centers. The police repression of ACME-AAYM's civil rights activism and anti-police brutality protests brought tensions to the boiling point.

On August 9, 1966, police officers arrested three Black men for 'loitering' outside the Afro American Youth Movement's headquarters, sparking four days of conflict between Black residents and DPD. The police department and city government praised themselves for preventing a major 'race riot' through the rapid deployment of militarized force and believed that a “fortuitous rain” prevented the conflict from spreading to other Black areas in the city. The outbreak of the deadly  Watts Riot/Rebellion  (34 fatalities) in Los Angeles on August 11, in the middle of the Kercheval unrest, only served to convince Detroit's white leadership that their tough and fast police response had prevented a similar event from happening in the Motor City.

There are  three competing interpretations  of what caused the Kercheval Incident in Detroit:

1. Black Power Conspiracy to Incite a Riot. This view, promoted by the Detroit Police Department and other government agencies, blamed the radical Black Power activists in AAYM for advocating and inciting violence, and law enforcement used this claim to prosecute AAYM members and bring about the collapse of the organization.
2. Direct-Action Protest against Police Harassment. This interpretation, favored by some AAYM members and other civil rights activists in Detroit, portrayed the refusal of the three Black men to comply with police harassment outside of the ACME-AAYM headquarters as a protest action against the DPD's continuing campaign of repression. While AAYM did not advocate violence, its members did take a stand. It is worth noting that the arrested men all denied that they had planned any action.
3. DPD Instigation or Escalation of the Conflict to Destroy AAYM. The third possibility, which is not incompatible with the second one, is that the DPD instigated the Kercheval Incident for political reasons and that the undercover informants and law enforcement agents who had infiltrated AAYM took advantage of the conflict to 'advocate violence' in order to give the DPD a pretext to crush the Black Power group by arresting and prosecuting its leaders. The FBI definitely had at least one spy inside AAYM headquarters when the Kercheval Incident erupted, and the DPD had at least one additional informant, and likely more (this evidence is provided in Part IV below).

At 8:25 pm, a police cruiser approached seven Black males standing on the sidewalk outside the ACME-AAYM headquarters near the intersection of Kercheval and Pennsylvania. The white officers ordered them to “move on.” Four complied, but three allegedly refused—two AAYM members, Wilbert McClendon and James Roberts, and a neighborhood resident, Clarence Reed. The officers began to ticket them for loitering and asked for their identification. Again, all three refused to comply. The officers called for backup, and within minutes, two Tactical Mobile Unit (TMU) squad cars, designated for "riot control," arrived at the scene. By then a crowd of around fifty Black residents had gathered. 

As the officers tried to put James Roberts in a cruiser, a scuffle broke out--started by the officers, according to the Black men. Members of the crowd reportedly began shouting, "Police brutality!" “Whitey is going to kill us!” and “This is the start of the riot!." According to the police, Clarence Reed allegedly had a knife and in the commotion, he and one of the officers received superficial cuts. The twelve officers on the scene subdued the three men and charged them with inciting a riot and resisting arrest. The DPD also charged Reed with felony assault. Both McClendon and Reed ended up incarcerated in state prison.

"The guy [police officer] jumped up out of the car and said, 'Give me this neighborhood. Give me this street.' . . . Before anything happened, they called for help, because we didn't move the way they wanted us to move. . . . They started pushing us around, . . . I went down, they crushed me, man, . . . they were all trying to hit me" -- Clarence Reed in a 2016 interview

Clarence Reed denied that he cut a policeman with a knife and said that the DPD officers had instigated the confrontation for no reason and then physically abused himself, McClendon, and Roberts. In a  2016 interview , Reed recalled that when the police ordered them off the sidewalk, he responded "what are you messing with us for, man? We ain't doing nothing, we're in our own neighborhood." He accused the police of roughing him up and then framing him on the inciting a riot and assault charges.

Wilbert McClendon also denied that he did anything at all except stand on the street corner and accused the DPD of targeting him as a former chairman of ACME in a deliberate effort to instigate the conflict.

An investigation by a civil rights group called Citizens for Fair Law Enforcement (excerpted at left) also disputed the DPD version and found that a large group of officers beat the three Black men. The investigation asked how so many TMU riot police could arrive so fast, and proposed that the DPD had planned the operation in order to frame ACME-AAYM for inciting a riot (full story below).

The crowd grew to include more than 100 residents. As the police "manhandled" the three Black men, some in the crowd began shouting insults at officers and throwing rocks and bottles. Rumors then circulated around the neighborhood that the police had killed a man and broken another man's arms. 150 police officers swept the area in riot gear, armed with canisters of tear gas and bayonets mounted on their rifles. Crowds of Black youth threw rocks at passing cars and broke store windows. Thirteen people were injured, including four police officers, and six more people were arrested.

Police Commissioner Ray Girardin placed the DPD on high alert and launched the riot prevention operation. TMU cruisers in units of six patrolled the Kercheval-Pennsylvania area, and the Mounted Division, officers on horseback trained in crowd control, waited in reserve on Belle Isle in case violence spread elsewhere in the city. The DPD also instructed officers to avoid making mass arrests for minor offenses and to use force sparingly, which probably played a role in minimizing the extent of the unrest, and was strikingly different from the violent police response that escalated the  Detroit Uprising of 1967  the next summer.

"We are forced to conclude that the police acted in such a way as to provoke a situation which they could call a riot, which would allow them to arrest members of ACME and AAYM -- Citizens for Fair Law Enforcement, August 18, 1966

One likely explanation for the DPD's relative restraint during the Kercheval Incident--compared to what happened in 1967--is that it was a  planned, targeted law enforcement operation  against ACME-AAYM.

Early Wednesday morning, acting on a tip from the FBI informant inside ACME-AAYM, police officers stopped three cars leaving the group's headquarters and discovered hunting knives, rifles, bricks, and ammunition. Several of the men arrested were affiliated with AAYM and one, General Gordon Baker, was a prominent radical activist and leader of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Baker and another man received a 5-year probation sentence for "carrying a dangerous weapon in a motor vehicle," a selective prosecution based on a discretionary law given that it was not illegal to carry these weapons in general.

In a  report to Mayor Cavanagh  about the Kercheval operation, Police Commissioner Girardin provided information that the DPD’s  Criminal Intelligence Bureau  (a.k.a. the "Red Squad") had been surveilling “rabid organizations” including ACME-AAYM for years, and General Gordon Baker also was under constant DPD and FBI surveillance.

DPD riot police circulated throughout the Kercheval/Pennsylvania area in militarized "saturation patrols" into the evening and arrested around 50 more people, but major violence did not break out.

On Thursday, Black community leaders took action to end the disturbance. Ministers, block club representatives, and other civic leaders created a plan to control rumors and began patrolling to calm the situation. They urged the media not to inflame tensions with sensationalized reports and defined their roles should future incidents occur.

The police arrested only fifteen people on Day 3 but maintained a massive armed presence on the streets.

On Friday, Black community leaders continued their "peace patrols," dispelling rumors and urging residents to stay indoors. The police arrested six young Black males for minor offenses and also arrested six white males for intervening in the situation looking to stir up racial unrest.

Alvin Harrison, the head of AAYM,  called a press conference  at the group's headquarters and accused the police department of instigating the Kercheval incident. He labeled the incidents that the police and media called a riot to instead be "a rebellion by the Black community against an oppressive situation."

Police Commissioner Ray Girardin submitted his  report on the Kercheval Incident  to the mayor on August 26, 1966. He blamed the AAYM and young Black criminals for the "mini-riot" and praised the police department for its outstanding response and admirable restraint. Read the report below. (Note: this, below, is a 10-page report provided as a documentary resource and has been summarized in the day-by-day account above, so some readers might want to skip ahead).

"This attempt to destroy two militant civil rights organizations" -- Citizens for Fair Law Enforcement, August 18, 1966

On August 18, a new coalition called Citizens for Fair Law Enforcement published "Who Started the Kercheval Street 'Riot'" as a paid advertisement in the Detroit Free Press. People Against Racism, the white radical group started by former ACME member Frank Joyce, created this account based on the statements provided by ACME-AAYM members who were arrested and their experiences with the multi-year police harassment campaign. The report blamed the Detroit Police Department for instigating the loitering arrests as a smokescreen to claim that Black Power activists were inciting a riot and pointed out that the DPD had arrested all of the ACME-AAYM leaders and many of the members during the crackdown. The so-called "mini-riot" was really part of an ongoing DPD "attempt to destroy two militant civil rights organizations." Read these charges below:

The DPD's political surveillance operation secretly spied on the mass meeting called by Citizens for Fair Law Enforcement to expose what really happened in the Kercheval Incident. The lengthy surveillance report, reproduced below, provides a remarkable glimpse into the internal discussions of a radical coalition, made possible because of the DPD's  systematic abuses  of constitutional rights and civil liberties in spying on political activists throughout this era.

In the aftermath of the Kercheval Incident, mainstream civil rights organizations called for reforms of the DPD and more poverty programs for the East Side neighborhood. The establishment newspapers and the white liberal administration of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh congratulated the DPD on successfully preventing a major race riot. Black Power groups and other radical organizations accused the police department of framing ACME-AAYM and instigating the conflict. And the police department and prosecutor charged the group's key leaders with inciting a riot in a clear attempt to dismantle the organization.

The white press commended the DPD for the way it handled the Kercheval disturbance. The Detroit News praised police officers for "remarkable . . . control and restraint" and labeled ACME-AAYM "a group whose moving spirit is automatic hostility to and harassment of the police, spoiling for the violent confrontation they apparently deem inevitable."

The Michigan Chronicle, the city's Black newspaper, reprimanded the young "troublemakers" who threw rocks and broke store windows but also recognized that they were not the "real criminals."

"The real criminals are not the four youths who are accused of ‘inciting a riot,’ but the Mayor, the Police, exploiting shopkeepers, biased teachers, the white papers which did not tell it like it was to the white community, the poverty program officials who didn’t set up a program in the Kercheval area, which they acknowledge as one of the worst in the city and who established the nearest community action center miles from there, and members of the Negro middle-class who want no part of their brothers jammed into the ghettos" -- Michigan Chronicle, August 20, 1966

The Michigan Chronicle also profiled Black youth from the Kercheval neighborhood and reported that they despised the police:

• "The police have been f---ing the people too damn long. We’re just plain sick of it. . . . If you’re just standing on the street, no matter how long you’ve been there, they run you off. If you’re in your car, they tell you to move on. If you drag your eyes, you’re wrong."
• "We don’t want better recreation, more lights, we just want to be able to have what we’re qualified for, to be able to go in and apply for a job and not be turned down in favor of some peckerhead who hasn’t got a bunch of traffic tickets on his record like we all do, thanks to them [the police]."
• "Let Whitey leave our neighborhoods. Let him open a liquor store out in Grosse Pointe [a rich white suburb] where they’ll respect him. Bet he won’t call his customers 'boys' out there. Let us control our own neighborhoods."

The Fifth Estate, a radical underground newspaper, called the so-called riot a "fantasy . . . staged by the Detroit Police with the assistance of the prosecutor’s office, city government, and the press."  The Fifth Estate also interviewed Alvin Harrison, the head of AAYM.

The Detroit Commission on Community Relations, the city government's civil rights agency, proposed the liberal reforms of improving the social conditions in "ghetto" neighborhoods, racially integrating the public schools, ending racial discrimination in housing and employment, and hiring 1,000 Black police officers. A group of African American community leaders calling themselves the Ad Hoc Committee on Community Peace also endorsed this five-point plan.

None of these recommendations in the five-point plan happened, and the law enforcement solution proposed by mainstream civil rights groups was far short of the Black Power demand for community oversight and control of the DPD. In October 1966, only about 200 out of 4,300 officers in the DPD were African American, and the ratio of white officers remained above 90 percent  throughout the 1960s .

Instead of police reform, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh called for the city to pass a  stop-and-frisk law  to formally authorize this very common police practice. Civil rights groups vigorously objected and prevented its passage until 1968, when the Cavanagh administration used the recent Detroit Uprising to enact the law. Even without the law, racial profiling through stop-and-frisk operations and other forms of militarized law enforcement  remained ubiquitous  in Detroit's Black neighborhoods.

The Cavanagh administration also continued to oppose the civil rights demand for a  civilian review board  to investigate police misconduct and brutality. The DPD instead continued to investigate itself and routinely covered up  assaults against Black citizens  and other systemic forms of misconduct.

The DPD continued to operate above and outside of the law.

The Wayne County Prosecutor charged four Black men arrested by the DPD with inciting a riot in connection with the Kercheval Incident: Alvin Harrison, Thomas Abston, Moses Wedlow, and James Roberts. The DPD charged two additional Black men, Wilbert McClendon and Clarence Reed, with loitering and resisting arrest for their alleged actions in the initial encounter on the sidewalk. Several other people faced additional charges, including General Gordon Baker and two other well-known Black radicals who received probationary sentences on the gun charges. The pretrial hearing depended heavily on the secret testimony of an FBI "spy" who was inside the ACME-AAYM headquarters and had tipped the DPD to arrest Baker and his companions as they drove away on the first night.

"The FBI refused to reveal the name of the informant. There are indications he was inside the Afro-American [Youth Movement] headquarters the night the disturbances started" -- Detroit Free Press, August 24, 1966

In addition to the sealed testimony of the FBI operative, two Black male juveniles testified against three AAYM leaders and claimed that they had been incited to commit violence against the police. The defense attorney and the radical coalition that mobilized to oppose the DPD's version of Kercheval charged that the police department and prosecutor had threatened to send the two young teenagers to juvenile detention to coerce false testimony.

The two teenagers testified that Alvin Harrison had urged them to "get our rights . . . even if we have to break car and store windows," that Thomas Abston had encouraged them to "burn the police" with Molotov cocktails, and that Moses Wedlow had told AAYM members to "go home and get your guns. . . . We'll throw rocks to break windows and when the police arrive we'll shoot them."

Despite this testimony, the judge dismissed the charges against Thomas Abston in a procedurally unusual ruling that raised suspicions of whether he might have been a police informant, and possibly even encouraged violence as a pretext to justify the DPD crackdown.

Alvin Harrison and Moses Wedlow were bound over for trial, but for unexplained and suspicious reasons, the trial never happened. There are only two explanations: either the men cut a deal with the prosecutors in exchange for testifying against other Kercheval defendants, or one or both of them were also undercover FBI-DPD agents from the start. Moses Wedlow ended up in a prison in Indiana and disappears from the story. Harrison's saga is explained in the final section below.

In early 1967, one or more of these three men accused of inciting a riot--Abston, Wedlow, and Harrison--secretly testified as the FBI spy and/or DPD informant against General Baker and his co-defendants on the weapons charges that resulted in convictions and probationary sentences.

Wilbert McClendon and Clarence Reed, the two Black men from the community who were beaten by police during the initial loitering arrests, received the harshest sentences of all. McClendon, the former ACME chairman, received a felony 1.5-to-2 year sentence in the state prison for resisting police officers in their performance of duty. Clarence Reed faced the same punishment and served about two months in prison before release.

Alvin Harrison, the head of the Afro American Youth Movement, was indicted for inciting the Kercheval "riot" and scheduled to stand trial in August 1967 but never did. He also did not take a plea deal that year. There is no logical explanation for this except that he was a secret, cooperating witness for the prosecution of other Kercheval defendants.

Instead of standing trial, while still technically under indictment, Alvin Harrison was named by Mayor Cavanagh in August 1967 to the  New Detroit Committee , a business-led initiative to rebuild Detroit and repair race relations after the deadly July Uprising. Harrison also lavishly praised Cavanagh's leadership of the city during the "Detroit riot," when at least 43 people died and  DPD officers killed  at least 22 African Americans, mostly young unarmed males. This, also, is extremely suspicious given that Harrison had bitterly denounced Mayor Cavanagh after the Kercheval Incident and proclaimed that "Black Power means violence if white America refuses to grant Black people those things that they need in order to exist."

Harrison disappears almost completely from the historical record soon after being named to the New Detroit Committee, with one exception. On March 22, 1969, the Detroit News reported that he had entered a guilty plea to a reduced charge of creating a public disturbance and received a suspended sentence. Harrison was not present, and the DPD's Special Investigation Bureau--the political surveillance unit that worked with police informants--had negotiated the unusual arrangement with the prosecutor's blessing.

It is likely that the FBI and DPD had more than one agent or informant inside ACME-AAYM. It is very probable that Alvin Harrison, the city's most outspoken Black Power leader in 1966, was one of them.

The strongest evidence that Harrison himself worked undercover for the FBI and DPD comes from a 1968 congressional hearing on "Riots, Civil and Criminal Disorders," conducted by the right-wing Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the U.S. Senate in March 1968. The hearing, held in Detroit eight months after the 1967 Uprising, sought to prove that a conspiracy of Black radicals had caused that violent event and also pursued a theory that the same radicals had incited the Kercheval "Mini-Riot." The Senate subcommittee called Detective Lt. William McCoy, who was in charge of the Demonstration Detail of the DPD's Special Investigation Bureau, its main political surveillance unit.

The complete evidence linking Alvin Harrison as the undercover FBI agent is contained on the longer " Aftermath of Kercheval " page of the companion Detroit Under Fire website exhibit. Highlights include:

• Frank Joyce, the co-founder of Detroit's Northern Student Movement affiliate, and Wilbert McClendon, the former ACME chairman arrested and incarcerated after the Kercheval Incident, believe that Alvin Harrison was undercover FBI, as do other former activists in their network.
• General Gordon Baker (now deceased), who was convicted based on the undercover spy's testimony, often stated that he suspected Alvin Harrison of being that person, according to Baker's biographer, Professor David Goldberg of Wayne State University .
• Alvin Harrison's name does not appear in any of the DPD political surveillance documents and FBI surveillance files of Detroit activists that our project has reviewed. Although this search is not and cannot be exhaustive, it was standard operating procedure for the FBI and other government surveillance units to redact or omit the names of their undercover agents and informants in these reports.
• In the mid-to-late 1960s, the FBI often recruited African American agent provocateurs who had backgrounds in the military and sent them to new cities to join emerging Black Power groups as undercover spies. Harrison was 25 years old when he joined ACME in 1965, immediately after moving to Detroit, which fits this age profile. And as Frank Joyce recounted in an  interview with our project , Harrison "sort of showed up out of nowhere" in the spring of 1965, and "we did notice he was somehow becoming the spokesperson." It was "strange when he showed up and strange when he disappeared," just as suddenly.
• As mentioned above, Harrison was the only Black Power radical invited to be on the New Detroit Committee and also praised Mayor Cavanagh for the brutal and violent crackdown on Black Detroit during the 1967 Uprising, while technically still under indictment for inciting the Kercheval Incident.
• Harrison,  according to  a white Catholic social worker who collaborated with him in 1967 on the city's antipoverty initiative, "has an airline ticket for Paris that he renews every day." This is additional inferential evidence that he had escape plans to go overseas as a moment's notice, presumably with the assistance of a government agency.
• Harrison disappeared from Detroit, and disappears almost completely from archives and newspaper databases, in October 1967, except for the brief Detroit News notation in March 1969 that he lived in Cleveland and took a plea deal arranged by the DPD political surveillance unit that resulted in no punishment. It is, of course, possible that his name was not even Alvin Harrison.

In the end, whether or not Alvin Harrison or someone else was the undercover FBI/DPD agent-informant is less important than the definitive evidence that the Detroit Police Department utilized one or more FBI spies who had infiltrated ACME and AAYM. These agent provocateurs allowed the Detroit Police Department to frame these direct-action protest organizations as advocates of violence against law enforcement, in order to justify the Kercheval crackdown and the conspiracy charges that effectively ended ACME-AAYM as a potent community-based movement against police violence and oppression of African Americans in Detroit. 

"The Kercheval Incident, Detroit 1966" is an initiative of the  Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab  at the University of Michigan, part of the U-M Carceral State Project's  Documenting Criminalization and Confinement  initiative.

This report is based on the Detroit Under Fire exhibit section " Radicalization and Civil Protest ," researched and written by  Jesse Blumberg, Hannah Thomas, and Matt Lassiter .

Story design by  Caroline Levine  and  Francesca Ferrara , student research associates with the U-M Carceral State Project, with additional editing and design by  Matt Lassiter , Professor of History and director of the Policing and Social Justice HistoryLab.

Full documents and citations for all materials used in this report are linked from the document excerpts and captions.

For more on police brutality and civil rights activism during this time period, please visit the website  Detroit Under Fire: Police Violence, Crime Politics, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Civil Rights Era . For additional investigative reports in this format, visit the " Policing and Criminalization " section of the Carceral State Project website.