MLK’s Boulevard and the Twelfth Street Rebellion

Martin Luther King Day was first proposed by Michigan Representative John Conyers in 1979.  It failed in Congress by five votes, and a huge petition was begun, which finally got the holiday approved in Congress in 1983.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Detroit used to be Twelfth Street, until that's where the riots were in 1967.  "Twelfth Street Rebellion" or "Twelfth Street Riot" was the popular name for the event at first.  And so they made it so there literally was no Twelfth Street.  The event became "the 1967 riots" for the most part; or if they retained a sense of place, it was as the "Detroit riot" (which is inaccurate, as there's been more than one).  They also worked hard to replace the word "rebellion" with "riot" — I remember adults correcting each other when I was a kid — because "riot" sounds like a bunch of unruly colored people, whereas "rebellion" sounds a bit more like an oppressed and segregated neighborhood getting fed up with the racist cops who made their lives hell.

I always wondered how MLK would feel, about his name being used that way.  Maybe if the city had made progress on its racial issues since that time, it would have been a nice sendoff, his name representing the peaceful change he hoped to see for African-Americans.  But it didn't get better, not at all.  So what, he goes down in local history as a cover-up?

I think I might start calling it the Twelfth Street Rebellion, though.  Just because.