Just in time for the Paris Olympics comes a film on Detroit's bid to host 1968 Games

The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris are set to begin Friday with the usual spectacle of the opening ceremony and the parade of athletes into the stadium. This year, basketball great LeBron James will be carrying a flag for the U.S. team.

What few people in Detroit may realize, however, is that the Motor City came close to hosting the Olympics in 1968.

Way back in 1963, the city competed successfully to be the U.S. contender for the site chosen by the International Olympic Committee. At the time, President John F. Kennedy called Detroit "the center of a great sports community.”

Plans were drawn up for potential Olympic venues, including a new main stadium at 8 Mile and Woodward. A song was written titled “Detroit Is Great for the Olympics in 1968." But as boosters rallied around dreams of Detroit on the global stage, racism at home sparked protests against the idea.

The divided reaction to Detroit’s Olympic quest is the compelling subject of a new documentary, “Detroit’s Olympic Uprising.” It will be shown free at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the University of Michigan Detroit Center.

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A date is being finalized to air the film on WJBK-TV (Channel 2) during the Paris Olympics. After that, it will be made available for streaming on the documentary’s official website.

Funded by the University of Michigan Arts Initiative and supported by its Projects in Partnership program, the film is directed by Stefan Szymanski and written by Silke-Maria Weineck, who co-wrote the 2020 book “City of Champions: A History of Triumph and Defeat in Detroit,” and edited by Aaron Schillinger, who’s best known as the filmmaker behind “Boblo Boats: A Detroit Ferry Tale.”

The result of their collaboration is a detail-rich telling of a story that, at times, seems stranger than fiction and continues to resonate with the Detroit and America of today.

Combining vintage photos and film footage with fresh interviews, “Detroit’s Olympic Uprising” traces the personal mission of Fred Matthaei Sr., a Detroit industrialist and University of Michigan regent, to make Detroit a host city for the games. Starting in the 1930s, Matthaei tried, failed and tried again for decades, and was eventually joined in the campaign by his son, Fred Matthaei Jr.

By 1963, as the film states, Detroit had lost more bids to host the Summer Olympics than any city on Earth.

Enter Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a young, well-meaning Democratic politician who was interested in changing the racist policies that plagued the city in areas like housing, policing and income opportunity.

Cavanagh was elected in 1961 with the vast majority of the Black vote. But as the film argues, his promises to Black constituents conflicted in 1963 with his desire to raise Detroit’s national profile, an aim that meshed perfectly with landing the Olympic games.

As Cavanagh and then-Gov. George Romney embraced the idea of a Detroit Olympics, two events threatened to bring the city’s racial tensions to a crisis point. One of them was the 1963 shooting and killing of a young Black woman, Cynthia Scott, by a Detroit cop who later was exonerated for his act.

The other was the Detroit City Council's (then known as the Common Council) vote against an open housing ordinance supported by Cavanagh that would have helped desegregate the city’s neighborhoods.

The film covers the birth of UHURU, a group formed by young Black activists at Wayne State University (and named after the Swahili word for freedom) that challenged the slow pace of civil rights reforms.

UHURU members staged a sit-in at Cavanagh’s office and led a march to Detroit Police headquarters asking for justice for Scott that drew more than 2,000 people.

They also raised their voices in boos during the national anthem at a large downtown rally to celebrate the end of a cross-country torch relay run designed to promote a Detroit Olympics. Protesters carried signs asking, “Is Detroit’s segregated housing ready for Olympics?”

The origin story of the documentary began when Szymanski, a professor of sport management at the University of Michigan, read a Michigan History magazine article about the 1963 bid. He saw in a footnote that the material for the piece came from the Detroit Public Library archive.

 “Being an academic, I said, 'Well I’ve got to go look at this archive.' And then I discovered ... 20 boxes of materials in Detroit Public Library, this whole history,” says Szymanski during a Zoom interview.

After Szymanski and Weineck, a professor of German studies and comparative literature at the University of Michigan, co-wrote their history of Detroit sports, they planned a Detroit Public Library exhibition about the 1968 bid that would be tied to the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. But the COVID-19 pandemic put a stop to the exhibition, while the games themselves were postponed until 2021.

Szymanski and Weineck’s next goal, making a documentary, moved ahead when they met Schillinger through mutual friends. Schillinger jokes that, as they told him about the decades of history efforts before the actual 1963 bid, “my eyes started glazing over. But then we got to these protests about people fighting against the Olympics.  And I was, like: 'Now we’re cooking! This is some interesting stuff here that also feels really relevant today.'”

Finding interview subjects proved challenging at first. Says Weineck: “We tried to find as many people connected to the event itself as we possibly could. That turned out to be really difficult. For a long time, we hit a wall. Stefan even went to senior homes in Detroit to ask, 'Does anybody remember this?'"

She continues: "It’s kind of this amazing thing that just got erased. I think people like to remember triumph. They don’t like to remember failure. I think that’s one reason why that whole long decades of bidding have kind of been memory-holed.”

Luckily, she and Szymanski connected with many important sources, including Julie Matthaei, the granddaughter of Fred Matthaei Sr. and a professor at Wellesley College, and Mark Cavanagh, the son of Jerome Cavanagh and a Michigan 2nd District Court of Appeals Judge

Through Wayne State professor David Goldberg, who also is featured in the film, they reached two key members of UHURU, Charles Simmons, an emeritus professor of the now-defunct Marygrove College, and Luke Tripp, a professor at Minnesota’s St. Cloud State University.

“It was really an honor to meet those guys,” says Weineck, describing them as being in 1963 “incredibly brave youngsters ... going up against  the mayor, the governor, the entire industrial elite, completely fearless.”

Weineck says that “Detroit’s Olympic Uprising” is all about contrasts such as the powerful one between Cavanagh’s vision of Detroit’s potential Olympic glory and Simmons and Tripp’s unswerving focus on the city's reality of systemic racism.

As members of UHURU were trying to convey the level of anger and despair in Detroit's Black community, Cavanagh was determined to paint Detroit as an ideal Olympic host.

Says Weineck: “I think Cavanagh’s a good guy, right? I don’t think he’s a villain in this story at all. He’s almost a tragic figure. But I think he did not understand the depth of the problem. He was a kind of young technocrat. (He) says, 'OK, let’s have some better policies and we’ll fix it.' These young people were trying to tell him, ‘No, you need absolutely fundamental change in the city.’”

Szymanski says the consensus on events like the Olympics is that their economic impact on cities is vastly overblown. He firmly believes, for instance, that the Paris Olympics will have zero economic impact on Paris.

That said, Szymanski admits that the possibility of Detroit hosting the 1968 Olympics is “the one case that’s ever given me pause in years and years of researching this stuff because it does strike me that there could have been changes.”

This doesn’t mean that things would have been better for Detroit, he stresses. In fact, they could have been worse.

On one hand, the capital investment for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics fostered improvements in employment and infrastructure and transformed the Spanish city into a popular European destination. On the other hand, poor people were displaced from their homes before the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics in an effort to hide areas of poverty from visitors.

In the end, the International Olympic Committee met in Baden-Baden, Germany, and chose Mexico City for the 1968 games, dashing the ambitions of the other three finalists: Detroit plus Lyons, France, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Four years after losing its Olympic bid, Detroit would erupt in a summer of violence. The 1967 riot devastated the city and left 43 people dead. A year later, the Kerner Commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson would conclude that white racism was responsible for the turmoil that happened in Detroit and many other cities across the nation.

As Weineck writes in the narration, we will never know the answer to the “what if?” of a Detroit 1968 Olympics and whether it could have changed history. What “Detroit’s Olympic Uprising” does reveal is the huge gap between selling a city to outsiders and actually dealing with the problems that it must face.

That gap is visible in the clip of Romney, four years before Detroit’s devastating summer of 1967, telling the world with oozing confidence: “Detroit’s the city of champions. We’re in shape to move. We have the spirit. Detroit shall be the United States site for the Olympian.”

Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.

'Detroit's Olympic Uprising'

5-7 p.m., Tuesday

The University of Michigan Detroit Center

3663 Woodward Ave., Suite 150, Detroit

Free screening and discussion with producers Aaron Schillinger, Stefan Szymanski and Silke-Maria Weineck hosted by the University of Michigan’s Center of Race & Ethnicity in Sports, the Arts Initiative and the Detroit Center. Register here for seats. To watch the trailer, go to the documentary's official website.