Detroit City Is the Place to Be (19 page)

Then, after serving three terms in the state senate, he ran for mayor against John Nichols, the white police commissioner. In his campaign Young promised to disband of STRESS,
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a deeply unpopular police operation created during the Gribbs administration in which undercover officers served as lures for would-be muggers and ended up fatally shooting a staggering number of black Detroiters. (Young also promised to fire Nichols if elected.) The numbers undergirding his victory turned out to be a grim statistical illustration of the region’s forked path, with 91 percent of white Detroiters voting for Nichols and 92 percent of black Detroiters backing Young. At the time, the city was still just under 50 percent white, so Young won by only 14,000 (out of 450,000) votes.

“On election day I became godamn mayor of Detroit,” he later wrote. But the truly frank analysis came a few lines later, when he acknowledged the reason for his win. “My fortune was the direct result of the city’s misfortune,” Young wrote, “of the same fear and loathing that had caused all of my problems and Detroit’s problems in the first place. I was taking over the administration of Detroit because the white people didn’t want the damn thing anymore.”

In his acceptance speech, Young fell back on one of the tropes of the genre, warning criminals to leave town because a new sheriff had arrived. “To all dope pushers, to all rip-off artists, to all muggers … It’s time to leave Detroit,” he said. “Hit 8 Mile Road. I don’t give a damn if they’re black or white, or if they wear Superfly suits or blue uniforms with silver badges. Hit the road.” Whites, and the media, reacted to what seems now like a patently unremarkable statement as if Young were a tribal chieftan ordering his most savage warriors to invade a peaceful neighboring land. While this reading of Young’s speech strikes me, at least, as an astoundingly obtuse, almost certainly deliberate misinterpretation, its effect on the public perception of the mayor was immediate and devastating—and must be placed in the context of the day, when the fight between the city and the nascent suburban bloc felt nothing short of existential. In Detroit, Young and his new black majority had taken the reins for the first time and had giddy hopes for a renaissance, one in which they would finally share in the riches and create their own version of the American Dream, while just across 8 Mile an exponentially expanding population of whites saw themselves as displaced persons, refugees of a race and culture war forced to build dissident strongholds, where the true way forward would be demonstrated. For both sides, there seems to have been a zero-sum attitude toward resources, growth, and the overall development of the region. It was not unreasonable to think that the city, already increasingly irrelevant to the concerns of the suburbanites, who were building their own factories and office buildings and shopping malls and sporting arenas, might soon actually cease to exist in any recognizable form.

And if you believed Young’s telling, the government did everything short of sending him exploding cigars to bring him down—only being a domestic enemy, the FBI was marshaled into service instead. Young became a target of federal investigations almost from the moment he took office, and though none of the charges ever stuck—on his death in 1997, he left an estate of $500,000, not exactly Boss Tweed money—several of Young’s highest-profile appointees violated the public trust over the years, most prominently his longtime police chief and close friend William Hart, who was convicted, during Young’s final term, of embezzling $1.3 million from an undercover-police fund. Hart was brought low by a deputy police chief named Kenneth Weiner, the son of a former Young accountant, who had started several businesses with the mayor, including one selling gold South African Krugerrands.

Young may very well have been dirty. But it doesn’t require an outrageously conspiratorial bent to wonder if, only a few years after J. Edgar Hoover’s well-documented targeting of MLK and the Black Panthers, a prominent black politician with as avowedly radical a past as the mayor’s
14
might not have been subjected to specially zealous scrutiny.

What remains undeniable, of course, is Detroit’s continued decline over the Young years—from the Devil’s Night fires to the skyrocketing murder and unemployment rates to the crack cocaine epidemic—this, despite a handful of not-insignificant victories, including integration of the police department (and of city hall in general), a promotion of minority-owned business through increased government contracts, and a politically dexterous budgetary maneuver (involving voter-approved tax increases and state-level horse trading) that prevented the city from going bankrupt in the early eighties.

Young also certainly understood the concept of playing to your base. People tend to look at “white flight” as a prima facie bad thing—and that’s true if you’re talking about the flow of capital out of the city or more high-minded ideals of cohabitation and a united, color-blind populace. But for blacks who’d long been denied the right to move to certain neighborhoods and take certain jobs, who had been brutalized by a police force that felt more like an occupying army, a reasonable response to white “flight” might also be “Good riddance!” In the same vein, could a mayor who won office with almost zero support from those fleeing white voters have been expected to lure them back to the city, where they would promptly attempt to vote him out of office? This is not to say making whites feel unwelcome in order to maintain a black majority was somehow Young’s endgame, an urban Democrat’s twist on the GOP’s Southern strategy. In fact, Young deliberately maintained a so-called 50/50 white/black government appointment policy, even as the changing demographics failed to reflect such a split—Young being a canny enough politician to understand he’d have to cut deals with a white regional business elite, not to mention the statewide government.

Still, as Young’s cowriter noted in the introduction to
Hard Stuff
, the new demographics of the city “left the mayor in the uncommon position of simultaneously representing both a city and a race.” Maynard Jackson was elected the first black mayor of Atlanta the same year as Young, and his more easygoing, accommodationist approach—and Atlanta’s widely different fortune—makes for a tempting projection of an alternate possible destiny had Young not been so ornery. But Jackson’s electorate included a prospering African American middle class, fostered by the city’s growing economy and several historic black universities. Detroit, meanwhile, had a yawning underclass, poorly educated and mired in poverty. And so Young faced the same negative feedback loop any mayor, black or white, raging or conciliatory, would have likely faced: a steady loss of jobs and residents that had started long before he took office, leaving behind the poorest and least employable, which meant an ever-dwindling tax base, which meant increasingly diminished city services (including the sort of policing made especially necessary by such concentrations of poverty), which meant the city became ever more unlivable, thereby driving away more residents and businesses, thereby further eroding the tax base.

Perhaps if Young had been more of a visionary, he might have found some way to staunch the bleeding. But with the election of Ronald Reagan—needled throughout the 1980 campaign by Carter loyalist Young, who described the future president as “Old Pruneface”—federal disinvestment in urban centers exacerbated the struggles of big-city mayors across the country. And Young made plenty of mistakes of his own, throwing his support behind pointless boondoggles (the People Mover monorail) and ill-conceived moneymaking schemes (his tireless push for downtown casinos, which didn’t pass until he’d left office) and rolling over for General Motors when the company threatened to pull a major factory out of the city unless space was cleared for a “state-of-the-art” robot plant. In the latter case, Young employed eminent domain—the same mechanism he decried for destroying his beloved Black Bottom neighborhood—to level Poletown, handing more ammunition to his critics, who pointed out that, of all the locations in the city he might have chosen to build the new plant, he’d settled on one of the last composed largely of working-class whites.
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There’s no doubt that Young was a flawed mayor, and perhaps even the wrong man handed the wrong job at the wrong time. But the wild, disproportionate hatred of Young by white suburbanites was telling in ways that had nothing to do with the mayor’s alleged malfeasances. With hindsight, it’s difficult to understand how he managed to become so fearsome, with his cotton-mouthed, almost courtly speaking style and jowly stuffed-animal features, the twinkle in his eye perpetually giving his game away. (Like Bill Clinton, he was the sort of politician who brought to the class struggle the same skills he’d developed for years in the ass struggle.) Even today, there’s an unsettling fervency to the hatred of Young among certain white ex-Detroiters, who will tell you
Coleman Young ruined this city
with such venom it’s impossible not to see Young as a proxy for every black Detroiter who walks the halls of their old high schools or sleeps in the bedrooms of their childhood homes.

As for Young, by his final years in office, Detroit had become his fiefdom, and he developed an arrogance, which, for the first time in his life, struck many as more defensive than offensive. Detroit’s obvious failings could not be fully acknowledged, in part out of political calculation but also, surely, for deeply personal reasons—for how could a figure as talented and exceptionalist as Young
not
feel a profound sense of sadness and regret,
not
be driven slightly mad, by the sight of his beloved city falling into ruin all around him? He had bucked the system and even changed it. But he had not been able to save his hometown. At his final press conference, Young declared Detroit’s best days were still ahead. Did he believe it? Or was it just his way of saying,
Can’t get any worse than this, folks.

*   *   *

The most intriguing news from the 2011 census data wasn’t the drop in Detroit’s population, which, while steeper than expected, was nonetheless relatively unsurprising, but rather the new racial porousness of 8 Mile Road. While middle-class black flight from the city had been taking place for years, primarily to Southfield, the numbers had escalated dramatically over the past decade—obviously, as the 200,000 resident population plunge in Detroit indicated—and the migration patterns no longer seemed limited to specific suburbs. By 2010, Southfield was 70 percent black; the number of black residents in Warren jumped from 4,000 to 18,000; in Macomb County, the black population tripled to become 9 percent of the overall demographic makeup.

In a funny way, the recession had helped this integration along. With the collapse of the housing market, many white suburbanites had no choice in the matter: they simply couldn’t leave, even if they wanted to. Perhaps Detroit’s suburbs were experiencing an upside to the downturn, the incompetence of the Bush economic team having inadvertently managed the equivalent of Eisenhower’s sending troops into Little Rock—forced integration through economic collapse!

There was friction, to be sure. As crime statistics shot up in the wake of the recession, there were alarming reports of carjackings in Grosse Pointe, armed robberies of fast food restaurants in St. Clair Shores, a shooting at my childhood mall. The expected slew of racist comments followed on the websites of community newspapers like the
Macomb Daily
. Fascinatingly, the Associated Press reported on similar tensions breaking out in Southfield—only here, they were occurring between longtime middle-class black residents and lower-income homesteaders who could suddenly afford to move out of Detroit as suburban rents and home prices fell. According to the article, the city had enacted “aggressive blight enforcement” laws after black Southfield residents began complaining of “newcomers from Detroit” who failed to maintain their property, walked and played basketball in the middle of the street, and “allow[ed] their children and teens to walk city streets at all hours.”

The stresses of integration also seemed to be cutting along both sides of 8 Mile. Back in Detroit, the white population had actually
grown
for the first time in sixty years. The uptick was very slight—rising from 9 percent to about 13 percent—but enough for some black Detroiters to take note of all the young white people riding around on their bikes, raising chickens and goats in the middle of the city, and overrunning old dive bars that used to be frequented by middle-aged black transvestites. Typical gentrification worries about shifting power dynamics came into play, along with open talk about “outsiders” disrespecting “the community,” how these kids walked around as if they owned the place.

“I’ve been thinking about the psychology of fear,” a black Detroiter in her fifties told me. “It’s interesting how white people can move into a neighborhood and walk down the street and think it’s okay. Or go skateboarding at night. Or throw open all their windows. What makes them think they can do that?” She delivered the lines like a comic bit, almost, but she also seemed properly amazed. “Black people, we feel like we have to put bars up, be all huddled up in the dark,” she went on. “White people are able to change the dynamic. Do they
demand
better? Walking down the street, do they bring expectations that everything will be okay, and that if they call the police, police will come? Do muggers think, ‘Shit, this might be more trouble than it’s worth?’” My friend chuckled. “This is funny in a way, because of course lots more white people are terrified of Detroit and won’t set foot down here. This is a subset of white people. So it’s interesting, all of these levels of misunderstanding. You sort of can’t win.”