Poor People's Campaign, Detroit 1968

Story design by Caroline Levine; based on the  Detroit Under Fire  exhibit section "Cobo I: Poor People's Campaign," researched and written by Sahil Patel and Matt Lassiter. View all investigative reports in this series  here .

On May 13, 1968, a large contingent of white Detroit police officers brutally attacked a group of nonviolent Black civil rights activists during a march organized by the Poor People's Campaign. The march in downtown Detroit was part of the nationwide mobilization of a multiracial "Poor People's March on Washington" for racial and economic justice, led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The events in Detroit took place five weeks after Rev. King's assassination in Memphis and demonstrated once again that politically motivated police violence against civil rights activists did not just happen in the Jim Crow South. We remember the police assaults on peaceful Black protesters in Birmingham in 1963, and in Selma in 1965, but the same pattern of violence by white law enforcement officers against civil rights and black power activists happened  again and again in the northern city of Detroit  during the mid-to-late 1960s.

The Detroit Police Department (DPD) falsely blamed the Black youth for provoking the May 13 incident that took place outside Cobo Hall in the heart of the downtown business district. Despite sustained civil rights protests, the DPD whitewashed the internal investigation and claimed that the actions of its officers were necessary and justified to contain the "unruly crowd." This is disproved by the extensive witness and photographic evidence presented in this report, drawn from the archival records of the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (the city's main civil rights agency), the investigative files of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and internal DPD materials provided to the mayor's office.

The unpunished police attack on peaceful civil rights marchers happened because of the official policies and practices of the Detroit Police Department and the Detroit city government, not just because of the actions of the officers on the scene. The police department  created the Tactical Mobile Unit  (TMU), which was responsible for the worst violence during the May 13 incident, in 1965 with the dual mission of patrolling "high crime" areas (meaning Black neighborhoods) and maintaining "crowd control" during demonstrations--a direct response to the escalation of civil rights and anti-police brutality protests during this era. The DPD's operational policies gave officers the discretionary authority to order "unruly" and "disruptive" crowds to disperse and left this up to the "professional" judgment of the policemen on the scene.

As a result, the DPD considered the discretionary use of force against political activists engaged in protests and demonstrations to be inherently justified, and the officers on the scene did not have to wait for any illegality to take place before moving in aggressively, often with  extreme and indiscriminate violence . Police officers often justified their actions by accusing and arresting political activists for trespassing, loitering, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, obstructing an officer, assaulting an officer, and the full range of discretionary polices of criminalization available to control the public.

The police attack on the Poor People's Campaign in May 1968 was only one incident in a dramatic, racially and politically motivated, escalation of law enforcement violence against Detroit's Black community in the aftermath of the  1967 Uprising . The white-controlled DPD responded to the racial conflicts of the late 1960s, and especially the expansion of the black power movement, with a  militarized campaign  of discriminatory law enforcement combined with political repression against civil rights and radical left organizations. The DPD pursued "crime control" through massive racial profiling, enhanced by a stop-and-frisk law that Mayor Jerome Cavanagh signed in 1968, and  stonewalled numerous investigations of police brutality  by local and state civil rights agencies. The Detroit Police Officers Association union, dominated by extreme white conservatives, also  obstructed all investigations  into police misconduct and brutality and insisted that law enforcement should have unquestioned authority to use force to maintain "order" in the streets.

Civil rights organizations accused the DPD and city government of a formal campaign of violent racial oppression against the Black community, as seen in this protest document (above right) sent to Mayor Cavanagh by African American state senator Coleman Young in November 1968. Young recounted the DPD's violent attacks on  Black student protesters  in public schools, pacifist activists  in the Poor People's Campaign , young New Left protesters  at a George Wallace rally , and African American  teenagers at a church-sponsored dance , among many other acts of police oppression. During the next two years, the DPD also conducted illegal surveillance and harassment campaigns culminating in armed assaults against Black radicals in the  New Bethel Incident  (March 1969) and during a sustained confrontation with the  Black Panther Party  (Dec. 1969-Oct. 1970). In response, civil rights activists moved beyond their longstanding demand for a civilian review board to oversee police brutality investigations to demand community control over an out-of-control police department. The fundamental issue facing the city of Detroit, Coleman Young insisted, was "just who is running this city--the police or the people."

In the spring of 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King delivered an early version of his "I Have a Dream" speech in downtown Detroit, two months before the March on Washington, after leading 125,000 people in the " Walk for Freedom " down Woodward Avenue. Five years later, the Midwest Caravan of the Poor People's Campaign came to Detroit on the way to a second Poor People's March on Washington, one of nine caravans sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference traveling to D.C. from different parts of the United States. The Poor People's Campaign called on the federal government to provide economic security and racial justice for all Americans through guaranteed employment, a fair living wage, and other programs to uplift low-income families and communities. Racial tensions were high in the spring of 1968, particularly because of the weeklong outbreak of urban unrest and protests across the country that followed King's assassination on April 4. In Detroit, Mayor Jerome Cavanagh had declared a "state of emergency" and mobilized the police in force to prevent a "second riot" that did not in fact happen.

The leader of the Midwest Caravan was Father James Groppi (left), a Catholic priest from Milwaukee and a prominent white activist in the civil rights movement. On May 13, around 700 people in the Midwest Caravan arrived in Detroit in a fleet of buses, including a large number of Black youth from Milwaukee. Hundreds of local Detroit residents, including a number of white Catholic activists from the suburbs, joined them for the Poor People's Campaign march down Woodward Avenue, scheduled to culminate in a rally inside Cobo Hall.

The administration of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a white liberal who had embraced increasingly  punitive "law-and-order" politics , responded by welcoming the Poor People's Campaign while mobilizing the Detroit Police Department to "escort" the marchers through a strategy that doubled as preemptive "riot control." The DPD dispatched the Tactical Mobile Unit in a massive crowd control operation, along with officers on horseback from its Mounted Bureau. The U.S. Department of Justice sent two officials from its Community Relations Service to observe the event, including by compiling the photographic evidence contained in this report.

The incident began around 8:45 p.m., when the official lead car of the Midwest Caravan stalled outside of the Cobo Hall entrance. At the time, more than 1,000 marchers and supporters of the Poor People's Campaign were making their way into Cobo Hall for a series of speeches and events.

The worst violence occurred as the marchers and bystanders fled from the Mounted Bureau police and tried to seek refuge inside Cobo Hall. Riot control police in the Tactical Mobile Unit converged on the scene and began beating African American civilians, especially the Black youth in the Cobo entrance area, along with a few white participants. Another group of around 50 DPD officers charged out of Cobo Hall and began assaulting the marchers with billy clubs and nightsticks.

The Midwest Caravan of the Poor People’s Campaign delayed its departure in order to meet with Mayor Cavanagh the next morning and demand a full investigation, including the firing of three specifically identified white officers. The mayor publicly apologized to the Poor People's Campaign and promised a prompt and thorough investigation.

Civil rights, black power, and liberal religious organizations joined together to release a "Statement of Protest & Demand for Action." The signatories included the NAACP, ACLU, black radical organizations including the Inner City Organizing Committee, the Metropolitan Detroit Council of Churches, and several suburban social justice groups. The statement denounced the DPD for its "callous racism" and "utter disregard for constitutional precepts."

The "Statement of Protest & Demand for Action further argued that the attack on the Poor People's Campaign was part of a larger pattern of "police conduct going unpunished" in the city of Detroit. The civil rights coalition charged that Mayor Cavanagh had lost control of the police department and that its unconstitutional actions and "flagrant abuse of police power" had to end immediately.

Reverend Albert Cleage, a leading black power activist and head of the Inner City Organizing Committee, sent his own list of demands to Mayor Cavanagh. Rev. Cleage had been a key organizer of protests against police brutality since 1963, when  massive demonstrations  followed the shooting of an unarmed Black woman by a white police officer who was exonerated. After the attack on the Poor People's Campaign, Cleage demanded appointment of a Black police commissioner and called for elected civilian review boards in each police precinct with the power to discipline and fire brutal officers. Cleage also demanded that the mayor discontinue the "stop-and-frisk" policing policy that led to comprehensive racial profiling and frequent police violence against Black citizens. Instead, Mayor Cavanagh ignored all of his demands and  signed a formal stop-and-frisk ordinance  a few months later.

Mayor Cavanagh also received protests from white residents of metropolitan Detroit who had participated in the march, especially Catholic social justice activists. Eve Walsh, a self-proclaimed "suburban housewife and mother," had attended the event with her two daughters. In her letter (at right), Walsh asked the mayor why the city had mobilized hundreds of police officers for a nonviolent march sponsored by a pacifist organization (the Southern Christian Leadership Council).

Eve Walsh then described being caught up in the police assault at the Cobo entrance, "attacked without warning" by officers shouting obscenities and beating them with clubs and nightsticks. She concluded that the Detroit Police Department, which claimed that its mission was to uphold law and order, "were themselves the oppressors and originators of violence."

The Detroit Police Department whitewashed its internal investigation by criminalizing the marchers from the Poor People's Campaign in order to exonerate the officers on the scene. This was standard operating procedure in a police department that did not fire a single police officer for an on-duty allegation of brutality made by a citizen during the entire decade of the 1960s. The DPD coverup took place even though four members of its internal affairs agency personally reported that they witnessed no provocation from the marchers before the police assault.

The Citizens Complaint Bureau (CCB), the completely ineffective internal affairs agency that carried out the official investigation, was deliberately understaffed and under great pressure from the DPD to exonerate officers who faced brutality complaints from citizens. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission, which had investigative powers but lacked enforcement authority, released a  major report in 1968  accusing the DPD and CCB of systematically covering up policy brutality against Black citizens and obstructing civil rights inquiries as a de facto policy.

Initially, as civil rights groups protested to the mayor, the DPD suspended the two ranking officers on the scene during the mounted assault, Lieutenant Teddy Sikora and Sergeant Fred Wright, for "neglect of duty" for ordering removal of the stalled car. But a police department trial board led by Superintendent John Nichols exonerated both men and ruled that they had been "helpful, courteous, and proper" at all times in the face of an "unpredictable and at times defiant" crowd of marchers. This script also shaped the CCB's internal inquiry, which found no conclusive evidence of police misconduct but stated that marchers "taunted and harassed" the officers on the scene. Even if true, which was doubtful, this claim justified physical force by police officers based on verbal communications by the marchers.

The Citizens Complaint Bureau investigation took two months and sided with the police version of events at every turn, with only a mild comment that "emotions were running high on both sides." The CCB report discounted all of the witnesses from the U.S. Department of Justice and the Detroit Commission on Community Relations (recounted above) and defended the police actions as necessary to control an "unruly crowd," even asserting without any evidence except self-interested police testimony that the marchers had thrown "objects and missiles" at the officers on horseback to instigate the violent encounter.

Scroll through excerpts from the CCB report in the gallery below.

The Citizens Complaint Bureau report identified only one individual officer, Patrolman John Kursteiner of the Tactical Mobile Unit, for engaging in "questionable activity." Two witnesses from the Department of Justice testified that they observed Patrolman Kursteiner beating an "unidentified Negro male," and a photograph (below) taken by a private citizen also revealed his direct involvement. The DPD declined to take formal disciplinary action against Kursteiner.

Inspector Chester Sylvester had given the order for the DPD officers on foot to move in formation against the marchers who were fleeing to the Cobo Hall entrance to escape from the Mounted Bureau assault. In the internal investigation, Inspector Sylvester testified that he had not been present outside Cobo Hall and had not seen any evidence of physical force by officers under his command. The above photograph provides strong evidence that Inspector Sylvester, along with many other police officers on the scene, lied to cover up what really happened. A few months later, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission labeled this the " Blue Curtain "--an unwritten policy that DPD officers would cover up misconduct and brutality by fellow officers, including through false statements to internal affairs investigations.

The Detroit Commission on Community Relations, the city's civil rights agency, conducted its own investigation but lacked both disciplinary authority and the ability to compel testimony from police officers. The DCCR strongly criticized the Detroit Police Department for taking no action against any police officers after the internal CCB report (which was not available to the general public). The police department responded that "the case is officially closed."

Several months later, as a result of the DCCR's pressure, the police department announced that two officers, Patrolman Kursteiner and Patrolman John Kress (both identified in the above photograph) would face unspecified internal disciple for their role in the incident outside Cobo Hall. This mild reprimand was the only punishment administered to the dozens of police officers who participated in the mass, violent assault on peaceful civil rights marchers and then testified collectively that the marchers had provoked the encounter.

The DPD's internal investigation was a cover-up, but it is also important to emphasize that the entire premise of the investigation, based on whether individual officers had used excessive force without provocation and could be identified without doubt, distracted attention from the larger policies that caused attack on the Poor People's Campaign and  many other episodes of mass police violence  during the late 1960s. The Cobo Hall assault resulted from the Detroit Police Department's explicit policies of militarized "crowd control" and "riot control" against political activists, even nonviolent and peaceful marchers, and therefore responsibility for the assault went all the way to the top of the DPD hierarchy and of the city government. Focusing too much on whether Patrolman Kursteiner should be punished, as the DCCR did, is to miss the larger policy question of why and how DPD officers on the scene used deliberate and collective violence against nonviolent marchers and activists.

Civil rights and black power activists understood the broader picture and made these arguments forcefully, implicating the Detroit Police Department and the Cavanagh administration for policies of racial control rather that crime control, enforced through discretionary police violence. The  manifesto  by state senator Coleman Young, reproduced in the introduction to this report, was part of the larger mobilization of Black community organizations and radical left activists to demand community and civilian control of the DPD.

Sheila Murphy, a 21-year-old white student at Wayne State University, responded to the police assault on the Poor People's Campaign by founding the Ad-Hoc Action Group to protest and expose police brutality in Detroit. Murphy was an activist steeped in the radical social justice tradition of the Catholic Workers Movement and also worked for the West Central Organization, a direct-action Black empowerment community movement. She envisioned the Ad-Hoc Action Group as a bridge between black power organizations in Detroit and progressive white activists who lived in the city and the suburbs. Murphy also believed that the DPD would be less likely to retaliate against white anti-police brutality activists with violence, a  constant threat  and  everyday reality  for Black radicals.

On May 22, 1968, the Ad-Hoc Action Group picketed DPD headquarters to protest the Cobo Hall attack on the Poor People's Campaign. Then in early June, they held a three-day vigil and sit-in at the office of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to denounce the DPD coverup. The group of activists was interracial but majority white, with the involvement of many Catholics including several priests. The Ad-Hoc Action Group also presented a six-part list of demands, including punishment of the officers who brutalized the Poor People's Campaign marchers, establishment of a civilian review board to investigate police misconduct, and hiring of a Black police commissioner and far more Black officers.

The Ad-Hoc Action Group fiercely condemned the DPD's internal investigation as a whitewash and issued its own report attributing the events to a "police riot." The activist group argued that police brutality was an endemic problem--not just one caused by a few bad officers--citing both the assault on the Poor People's Campaign (which had become known as Cobo I) as well as the deliberate  police assault on white New Left protesters  at a George Wallace rally in October 1968 (Cobo II) and the outrageous racist attack by drunken white off-duty officers against a Black church youth group in the  Veterans Memorial Incident  (Nov. 1968). The Ad-Hoc Action Group joined a broad spectrum of civil rights and black power organizations in calling for a civilian review board to oversee the police department.

The civil rights and radical left movement against police brutality intensified during the late 1960s as the DPD engaged in violent crackdowns against the Republic of New Africa in the  New Bethel Incident  and against the  Detroit chapter of the Black Panther Party , and then again during the early 1970s as mass Black community protests erupted against the  deadly STRESS unit . In this July 1969 expose, the Ad-Hoc Action Group characterized the policies of the Detroit Police Department as repressive, racist, and overtly political in the deployment of violence to control the civilian population of Detroit, especially the Black community.

The unprovoked police assault on peaceful civil rights marchers during the Poor People's Campaign of May 1968 remained an open wound:

"Poor People's Campaign, Detroit 1968" 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  Cobo I: Poor People's Campaign  researched and written by  Sahil Patel and Matt Lassiter .

Story design by  Caroline Levine , an undergraduate student researcher 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.