After the
1967 Detroit riot, white residents began to leave the city en masse, taking their businesses along with them. Chaldean retail and grocery stores rushed to fill the void, often popping up in poor, majority-black, inner-city neighborhoods where the residents had few alternatives for their food and shopping needs. Tensions between Chaldeans and African Americans were already high due to the looting of numerous Chaldean businesses in the '67 riots. In the following years, these tensions only escalated. On one hand, many African Americans complained that Chaldean store owners employed almost exclusively other Chaldeans, even though they operated in mostly black neighborhoods. African Americans' concerns were aggravated because, in many cases, Chaldean grocery stores were their only source of food for miles around. Similarly, many Chaldeans were frustrated with the high rates of crime in Detroit's inner-city neighborhoods, leading them to increase security in their stores. Ultimately, Chaldeans and African Americans in Detroit knew very little about one another, leading to a heightened distrust that was only amplified by the tense racial and political atmosphere in post-1967 Detroit. The points of greatest contention between the Chaldean and African American communities in Detroit have been the frequent outbreaks of violence at Chaldean businesses. In 1980, James Douglass, a young black man, was murdered by two Chaldean brothers at their party store. A few months later, Nabil Zoma, a Chaldean store owner, was murdered in his shop by three black men in an attempted robbery. These killings angered Chaldeans and African Americans alike, even inspiring a small boycott of Middle Eastern businesses in Detroit. In 1999, Kalvin Porter, a 34-year-old-black man, was killed in a fight with two men of Middle Eastern descent outside a Chaldean-owned gas station. His death sparked intense debates between African American and Chaldean community leaders, even involving then-mayor
Dennis Archer. Many African Americans were infuriated over Porter's murder, especially given that the two men responsible were acquitted one year later by a jury containing only one black juror. Nevertheless, cooler heads on both sides, including Archer, attempted to ward off further interracial conflict by insisting the killing was not racially motivated and instead should just be mourned as a tragedy by both African Americans and Chaldeans. Events similar to these have put African American-Chaldean relations in jeopardy numerous times since 1967, often prompting boycotts and protests, and sometimes prompting meaningful discussion between community leaders. Despite ongoing quarrels between the two groups, there have also been many efforts on the part of African Americans and Chaldeans to bridge the gap separating their communities. For example, after the 1980 murders, Edward Deeb, the Chaldean American executive director of the Associated Food Dealers, and Walter Douglas, the African American president of New Detroit (a racial justice organization), founded a task force to prevent further conflict between the two groups. Although there were still substantial points of disagreement between Chaldean and African American members of the task force, its mere existence testifies to the fact that despite many grievances and ongoing tension, some members of both communities were pushing for greater unity all along. During the first Gulf War in 1991, when prejudice against Middle Easterners was at a high point nationwide, African Americans were some of the few to stick up for their Middle Eastern neighbors in Detroit. The
NAACP reported receiving many calls that year from members expressing support for Chaldeans, who they viewed as coming under attack. In the following years, multiple similar initiatives came into being, including the Harmony Project, which was founded in 1995 by an African American activist, Toni McIlwain, to negotiate disputes between the two communities, and the
Delta Sigma Theta sorority's solidarity event in 2001 that focused on increasing unity between African American Detroit residents and Chaldeans targeted by post-
9/11 racial profiling. ==Relationship with Iraq==