Although she declined to walk in her class’s commencement ceremony, Opal Robinson graduated from Eastern High in June 1967. A little more than a month later, Detroit exploded in five days of violence following a police raid on a party at an unlicensed bar. The eighty-two revelers arrested in the raid had gathered at the Twelfth Street speakeasy to celebrate two young soldiers home from Vietnam. Anger over the arrests translated into looting, arson, and worse after the National Guard arrived: Forty-three people, most of them Black men, were killed in street skirmishes.
