By the 1960s, Detroit was a tinderbox.

There was growing discontent around housing, at the city's economy, about the lack of opportunity, about overcrowded schools.

But one of the most important issues that played out in Detroit in that period was the persistence of police harassment and violence targeting African Americans.

One evening in July, 1967, those tensions boiled over.

July 23rd, on a hot summer night, there was a party.

The celebrations went on into the wee hours of the morning, and the Detroit police came to break it up.

They raid the place expecting to arrest 15, 20 people like they always getting these kinds of raids, but it's 85 people there.

Folks began to gather to see what the commotion was and soon took to the streets, breaking windows and lighting fires.

Soon, the uprising in Detroit spread, passed the black neighborhood on the west side to cover ultimately close to a hundred square miles of the city.

The National Guard was called in.

The National Guard.

They're young white men from small towns who've never really seen black people in real life.

They have military style weapons, but they're about as trained as Boy Scouts.

You put them in the middle of a rebellion/riot with angry black people, they answer it the only way they know how, by shooting them.

After five days of unrest, 43 people had been killed, more than a thousand had been injured, and over 2,500 buildings had been looted or burned.

The tragedy of 1967 was the huge number of deaths.

The majority of those 43 people who died, died at the hands of law enforcement officials.

Detroit was one of the most violent uprisings in the 20th century.

It was a collective expression of grievance, of frustration and discontent.