Devil's Night (4 page)

Later, as teenagers, we spent Christmas week downtown at the
Fox Theater, watching the Motown Revue (Marvin Gaye, Little Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, the Miracles, the Marvellettes, the Temptations and a movie for two bucks). In the summer we cheered Al Kaline and the rest of the Tigers from seventy-five-cent bleacher seats and ate chili dogs at the Lafayette Coney Island. In those days Detroit seemed like a model American community, an impression confirmed by
Look
magazine in 1962. when it dubbed it “a city on the go.”

Indeed, Detroit in the early sixties was what Los Angeles has since become—a place where poor people came to fulfill the American dream. Blacks and whites from the South, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe all came to work in the auto factories, where even an illiterate could find a steady, good-paying job and hope for something better for his children.

Like all dream cities, Detroit was not without a violent underside. In 1925, racial animosity boiled over when a black physician, Ossian Sweet, bought a home in a white neighborhood on the east side. An ugly crowd formed outside the house, and Sweet, along with some relatives and friends, barricaded himself inside. During the course of the incident, gunshots were fired from the house, and a white man was killed. Sweet and his friends were tried for murder, defended by Clarence Darrow, and after a second trial (in the first, the jury came to no decision) Sweet was acquitted.

Again in 1943, racial tensions spilled over into a riot, in which thirty-four people were killed and the army was called in to restore order. Nor was all the violence racially motivated; throughout the twenties and thirties, the auto unions fought bloody, occasionally fatal battles with company goons.

Still, people in Detroit tended to view these incidents as the unfortunate but necessary growing pains of an industrial giant. And, following World War II, in which Detroit became the Arsenal of Democracy, they seemed more and more a thing of the past. A year
after the war,
Detroit Free Press
editorial director Malcolm W. Bingay described his city this way:

In 1961, the Wonder City got a boy wonder for mayor, a thirty-three-year-old Irish lawyer named Jerome P. Cavanaugh, who bucked the Democratic establishment to win election. In office, Cavanaugh set about forming alliances with Walter Reuther's UAW, appointed a progressive chief of police, and brought blacks into municipal government. When Martin Luther King came to town in 1963, at the invitation of Reverend C. L. Franklin (Aretha's father), he was warmly welcomed by a city that regarded itself as the avant-garde of American liberalism.

In those days, everything seemed to be going in that direction. The vicious oligarchs of the auto industry had been replaced by brilliant technocrats who believed in computers and cooperation. One, Robert McNamara, was secretary of defense. Another, George Romney, widely considered a genius because he had concocted a way to save time by playing golf with three balls instead of one, was governor. On the labor side, Reuther and his followers were fast becoming partners, not adversaries, in the automotive dream.

The Cavanaugh administration epitomized the city's glowing image. The mayor was considered one of the brightest young stars
in America, a politician with the perfect Kennedy-era blend of old-fashioned blarny and state-of-the-art technocracy. In 1965, at a national mayors' conference, he stunned his colleagues by unveiling a new system in which computers would constantly monitor developments on every block of the city, allowing experts to intervene at the first sign of economic or social dislocation.

The bubble burst on the twenty-third of July, 1967. A police raid on an after-hours club on Twelfth Street, in the heart of the black ghetto, erupted into rioting. Forty-three people were killed in the streets of Detroit—most of them blacks shot by police or National Guard. Whole neighborhoods were looted and torched. Cavanaugh's computers could do nothing to restore order. When the cops and National Guard failed to end the insurrection, President Johnson sent in 4,700 troops from the elite 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Twice before, in 1863 and 1943, federal forces had been dispatched to put down racial disturbances in Detroit; their 1967 deployment made Detroit the only U.S. city in history to be occupied three times by the American army.

The Detroit riot was the worst of fifty-nine racial disturbances across the country in 1967; indeed, in terms of property damage and lives lost it was the worst in the twentieth century, and its impact on the city was dramatic. For Sale signs sprung up in every white neighborhood, seemingly in front of every house. There had always been a lot of vacant land outside the city, and Detroit's suburbs had been expanding slowly since the fifties; now developers threw up houses, schools and shopping malls beyond Eight Mile Road. Some people were so panicked that they spent the winter of 1967–68 sleeping on their relatives' couches, or shivered in half-completed tract homes. The riot touched off an exodus that left Detroit with a black majority within five years.

It also broke the spirit of Jerry Cavanaugh, who had left office in 1966 and run, unsuccessfully, for the Senate. His computers and good intentions had been useless in understanding the passions and grievances of the ghetto, just as McNamara's had proven worthless in deciphering the realities of Southeast Asia. In the mayoralty election of 1969, a moderate black candidate, Richard Austin, was narrowly
defeated by Roman Gribbs, a former sheriff. But it was a last gasp; four years later, the now mostly black city elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young.

In the aftermath of the riot, Detroit became the national capital of disingenuous surprise. People suddenly discovered what should have been obvious—that beyond the glittering downtown, the leafy neighborhoods, the whirring computers, there was another city: poor, black and angry.

For years, Detroit's growing black population had been dealt with through repression and neglect. The police department recruited southern cops who knew how to deal with Negroes; blacks took a risk just walking down Woodward Avenue. There was no place for their children on Santa's knee at Hudson's, which only employed light-skinned sales personnel (paper bag brown was the darkest permissible hue). Residential segregation and urban renewal, which plowed down the old Black Bottom ghetto without replacing it, caused extreme crowding. It was only through the smoke of burning buildings that these things became visible.

A committee, New Detroit, was established, ostensibly to “attack and overcome the root causes of racial and social disorder.” In fact, the committee, whose members included Detroit's business and industrial leaders, produced the rhetorical cover that enabled many of them to get themselves and their businesses out of town. A few whites did invest in the city. Henry Ford II helped finance the Renaissance Center, a gleaming white elephant of offices and stores, along the river. Suburban multimillionaires Max Fisher and Alfred Taubman put money into high-priced condos on the riverfront. But most of the city's merchants and financiers had no intention of leaving their money in Detroit, where any damn thing could touch off another riot. Besides, they argued, the money was already in the suburbs, and business is business.

Detroit's shift from a prosperous white city to a poor black one was extraordinarily fast; within six years of the riot, it had a black majority and a black administration. And the change was far more
complete than in other major American cities. Chicago maintained stable white ethnic neighborhoods and a vital business district; Washington, D.C., remained anchored by the federal government, which provided jobs; in Atlanta, mayors from the civil rights movement built economic and political alliances with white suburbia.

But in Detroit, events conspired to leave the city uniquely impoverished, abandoned and militant. The bottom fell out of the auto industry, causing mass unemployment. The abundance of land beyond the municipal boundaries enabled surburbanites to create an alternative downtown in the suburb of Southfield. And the new mayor, Coleman Young, elected in 1973, did not come from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a militant former union man who consolidated power by adopting a confrontational policy toward the city's suburban neighbors.

For the two and a half million whites who lived in America's most segregated suburbs, Detroit became The Corner writ large—an alien, threatening wreck, a place to drive through, if at all, with the windows rolled up and the doors securely locked. Whites not only left the city physically, they abandoned it emotionally as well.

When I told suburban friends that I planned to live and work in Detroit they reacted with disbelief and alarm. Some suggested a bodyguard, others a pistol. Most, however, simply warned me that I would probably not survive six months as a white man in the Murder Capital of America.

I was not unaffected by their warnings. I had no Charles to vouch for me, and in the preceding twenty years I had lost whatever street smarts I once had. My first trips into the city were jumpy affairs, spent mostly looking out the window of my car; in a way, I was back in my parents' Chevy, watching the action, afraid to come too close.

This was not simple paranoia—Detroit today is genuinely a fearsome-looking place. Many of its neighborhoods appear to be the victims of a sadistic aerial bombardment—houses burned and vacant, buildings twisted and crumbling, whole city blocks overrun with
weeds and the carcasses of discarded automobiles. Shopping streets are depressing avenues—banks converted into Fundamentalist churches, party stores with bars and boards on their windows and, here and there, a barbecue joint or saloon. The decay is everywhere, but it is especially noticeable on the east side, which has lost roughly half its residents in the past thirty years—the most extreme depopulation of any urban area in America.

Worst of all is downtown. Several of the landmarks on Woodward Ave. remain, and in the past few years there have been several grandiose building projects, but they can't obscure the fact that downtown Detroit is now pretty much empty. Hudson's stands deserted, and there isn't a single department store left in town. Entire skyscrapers—hotels, office buildings and apartment houses—are vacant and decaying.

During what should be rush hour, reporters from the
Free Press
play a macabre game, called King of the Corner. The object is to stand at a downtown intersection and look all four ways. If you can't see a single human being in any direction, you are King of the Corner. Every morning anoints its own royalty. Detroit, America's sixth largest city, is the only metropolis in the country where you can walk a downtown block during business hours without passing a living soul.

Suburban whites are dismayed by the physical degeneration of what was once their city, but they are truly terrified by its racial composition and the physical threat they associate with blacks, who constitute between 70 and 80 percent of the population. Some whites, mostly elderly, still live in the extremities of the city, and municipal employees are required to reside there by law (although a good many have fictitious addresses). But in most parts of town, most of the time, Detroit is as black as Nairobi.

The white abandonment of Detroit, coupled with the collapse of the auto economy, has left the city with a diminished tax base and a set of horrific social problems. Among the nation's major cities, Detroit was at or near the top in unemployment, per capita poverty, and infant mortality throughout the eighties.

The city is an impoverished island surrounded by prosperous suburbs, and almost nothing connects them. The Detroit area has virtually no mass transport, due mainly to the unwillingness of suburbanites to make their communities accessible to blacks. A few cultural institutions, such as the symphony and the art museum, have remained in town, but they are patronized mostly by whites. So are the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings (the Pistons and Lions play in the suburbs). Detroit and its satellite towns share a water system, two newspapers, and broadcasting facilities. The place where black and white Detroit come most intimately together is on the airwaves, where radio talk shows offer a steady diet of racially loaded charge and countercharge.

Most of all, the city and suburbs are separated by a cultural and emotional gap as wide as any that divides hostile nations. The suburbs purr with the contented sounds of post-Reagan America while the city teeters on the brink of separatism and seethes with the resentments of postcolonial Africa.

Twenty years in the Middle East had given me a good eye for tribal animosity, and in Detroit, even during my first days there, I recognized it. Strangely, it didn't seem personal. The local disposition is mild, even friendly. A great many people, black and white, were born in the South, and it shows in their manners. Strangers nod to one another on the street and make small talk in elevators. Standing next to one another at public urinals, men smile and say “How y'doin?” Black and white Detroiters rarely meet, but when they do—at work, in suburban shopping malls or at other neutral sites—it is not at all unusual for them to get along amicably.

In fact, the tribal rivalries, fears and hatred in Detroit tend to be collective and abstract. Each side has an orthodox, almost ritual explanation for what has happened to the city they once shared and no longer do, and, not surprisingly, each side blames the other.