Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race and Riots (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), 56-8.
According to the report of a special committee appointed by Michigan’s governor, the violence would not have spread beyond the [Belle Isle Bridge] were it not for a provocative rumor. This rumor was first recorded when a 17-year-old black, coming upon a crowd near the entrance of the bridge, said that a black woman and her baby had been drowned. […] The rumor had far more serious consequences when it reached the Forest Club, a night spot located in the heart of Paradise Valley, about three miles from Belle Isle. […] At about midnight, just as the band was finishing a number, a black man suddenly jumped on the stage, seized the microphone and identified himself as a police officer. The man urged the audience to get even with the whites for ostensibly killing a black woman and her baby by throwing them off the bridge. […]
Complicating the situation was a second rumor now circulating among the whites, to the effect that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman on the bridge. […] Variations of both sets of rumors also sprang up: whites threw a black baby from the bridge; blacks threw a white baby from the bridge[.]
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 160-1.
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