Aftermath of a Race Riot

Abstract

In the years immediately following the 1967 racial disorder crisis in Detroit, there existed between black and white community leadership ideological and policy polarization. Over the next decade such polarization transformed itself into a nonideological pragmatic accommodationist orientation. This analysis draws on Turner's emergent norm theory to interpret stages evident in the normative shift in black and white leadership attitudes and behaviors within a context of continuing stressful city conditions. Employing a combination of decisional, functional, and positional selection criteria, 14 black and 22 white community leaders were periodically interviewed and observed between 1968 and 1980. As posited in emergent norm theory, the crystallization and recrystallization of norms held by black and white community leaders involved multiple competing leadership ideas before a dominant norm emerged. While there are signs that a possible new emergent norm stage of repolarization may be developing, this analysis focuses on the interactionist process that resulted in a shift from interracial community leadership confrontation toward policy and pragmatic cooperation for a period of over a decade.