ELEVEN

DECEMBER 26, 1970

The Lions have the first chance in decades to make it to the Super Bowl, but they sputter out in the lowest-scoring postseason game in NFL history. Detroit once again tries to build a downtown stadium and once again fails—this time, because Detroit’s downtown is deemed too black and hence not safe enough. Instead, Detroit gets treated to the Renaissance Center, a now iconic part of the skyline, yet all but cut off from the city it is meant to serve. Detroit elects Coleman Young, its first black mayor.

The last time the Lions had been any good was 1957. For thirteen seasons in a row, the team had failed to make the playoffs. From 1958 to 1968, the team had played 148 games and won only 64 (43 percent). In this period they had only four winning seasons to their name. It was as if someone had locked them in the basement. Then, in 1969, everything changed: suddenly, the team was back in business, and in the 1970 season, the Lions went 10-4, with only one home defeat.

It was around this time that football was superseding baseball as the dominant national sport. 1970 was the year that the NFL, following the merger with the AFL, adopted the league structure that has largely remained in intact to the present day. The four divisions of the old NFL were expanded to six, giving the league twenty-six teams in total. Since then, the only significant change has been the addition of six more teams.

Football had always been big in the Midwest, and Detroit’s main rivals within their division have remained the same: the Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers, and the Minnesota Vikings. The expansion of the playoff system, however, opened new opportunities. Until 1970, you had to win your division to advance, but with six divisions, the creation of an elite eight allowed for two extra teams to make the cut, selected from the six teams that placed second place in their division. In 1970, Detroit’s runner-up record was good enough to get them there.

The revival of the Lions had a lot to do with quarterback Greg Landry, whom they had drafted two years earlier. He was growing into the role. The 1970 season was the first in which he threw for more than one thousand yards, to which he added a very respectable 350 rushing yards. In the divisional playoff, Detroit was matched against the Dallas Cowboys, who had topped the NFC East, also with a 10-4 record. The Detroit Free Press led with the optimistic headline, “Super Bowl–Starved Lions Roar Today.”1 If the players went on to win the next three games and took the Super Bowl, they were in line for a bonus of $25,000 each. The bookmakers made the Lions three-point favorites against Dallas, a small advantage, but an advantage nonetheless.

On December 26, disappointment struck. Both teams had very strong defenses, and the result was the lowest-scoring postseason game in history, a record which stands at this writing. Only twice in the game did the Lions make two consecutive first downs, and the team failed to score even once. The Cowboys managed a field goal in the first quarter, and neither team scored at all in the next two quarters. In the fourth quarter, Dallas drove to the Lions goal line and, rather than take the field goal, went for it on fourth down. The defense held them off, but when the Lions’ offense took over, the Cowboys forced a safety. 5–0. The Cowboys restricted Greg Landry to only 48 passing yards and 15 rushing yards. Near the end of the game, the Lions managed a drive that took them deep into Dallas territory, but it was not to be.

The Monday-morning quarterback at the Detroit Free Press complained that if only they had had more faith in Landry’s passing game, they might have won!² But Detroit, playing away from home, was facing one of the alltime great coaches, Tom Landry (unrelated to Greg). The Cowboys ended up losing to the Colts in Super Bowl V, but they went on to win Super Bowl VI the next year and Super Bowl XII in 1977. For two decades, Tom Landry’s Cowboys were a constant fixture in the postseason, while it would be another twelve years before the Detroit Lions made it to the playoffs again.³

Once the season was over, one of the longest-running sagas in Detroit’s history garnered attention again—the construction of a downtown stadium. Depending on how you count, this debate had raged since 1921, when the Detroit Free Press reported on whether “to build one gigantic stadium to seat 50,000 or to build two,” the larger structure being favored as a potential Olympic Stadium for the 1928 games.4 The Lions had started playing at Tiger Stadium in 1938, and they were still there when William Clay Ford acquired the team in 1964. Almost immediately, Ford started lobbying the mayor, the City Council, and anyone else who would listen to build him a stadium.⁵ After all, playing football in a baseball stadium, where many of the fans find themselves a long way from the sidelines, is far from ideal. In addition, Tiger Stadium could accommodate just over fifty thousand, and as the NFL’s popularity rose, demand for tickets far exceeded capacity. With only seven home games guaranteed, owners were understandably keen to maximize opportunity for ticket revenue. Equally unsurprisingly, they were keen to get other people to pay for it.

The city’s officials were, in fact, very eager to please, but they couldn’t agree as to the best site. There were two main contenders, the State Fairgrounds located at Woodward and Eight Mile, and downtown on the west riverfront where the railway yards were closing and redevelopment land was becoming available. Unrelated strategic interests informed preferences. George Romney, governor of Michigan from 1963 to 1969, and a crucial ally if state funds were to be tapped, wanted the Fairgrounds site, which would be more convenient for out-of-town visitors. Jerome Cavanagh, Detroit’s mayor from 1962 to 1970 and the poster child for progressive policies in the 1960s, initially favored the Fairgrounds site as well.⁶ Most city planners, who, at that point, held considerable sway over land use in the city, supported the mayor and the governor, although a minority held out for a riverfront development.⁷ The idea of transforming the riverfront from an industrial graveyard into a vibrant city amenity was seductive to anyone interested in preserving the downtown. By the mid-1960s, Cavanagh had switched sides.⁸ Meetings were held, reports issued, costs estimated, but few concrete steps were taken.

By 1970, William Clay Ford was becoming impatient. Truth be told, he was skeptical about a downtown stadium. The terms of the debate anticipated the hard-fought negotiations we described in chapter 10, developments that kept the Red Wings in town but took the Pistons to the suburbs. First, Ford worried that a central location would create congestion in the downtown, making it difficult to get fans into and out of the stadium while also alienating the surrounding businesses. Second, none of the plans provided for enough parking, further complicating the logistics. Third, he thought the estimated cost of $125 million was too high to be realistic, and if he signed up for the plan, it would only be scaled down later, to his disadvantage.9 But, perhaps above all, he worried about safety in the downtown. As far as he was concerned, most of his season ticket holders lived in the suburbs and he was fine with the idea of moving closer to them.¹⁰

Suburban authorities quickly jumped into the planning vacuum. First, the city of Southfield offered to build a facility.¹¹ When its offer didn’t suit, Pontiac, thirteen miles further north, entered the fray.¹² The Detroit politicians and planners were shocked when, in October 1970, the Lions announced they had signed an agreement to move to Pontiac, though it was only an agreement in principle. They had still thought that Ford was bluffing.¹³

Early in 1970, a group of business leaders in Detroit had gotten together to work on redevelopment plans in the city. The idea was credited to Joseph Hudson, president of the department store, and its proponents included representatives of the city’s banks and major businesses. Most importantly, it included the chiefs of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. Over the coming years, Henry Ford II, chairman of the board of Ford Motor Company, older brother of William Clay, became the driving force of the organization Detroit Renaissance, whose contribution to the Detroit Grand Prix we mentioned in chapter 9.¹⁴ Between 1970 and 1972, Detroit Renaissance dedicated itself to supporting plans for the downtown stadium, which it continued to promote even when William Clay announced the move to Pontiac.¹⁵ The organization did not give up until the plan finally collapsed in 1972, in the wake of a series of legal disputes.

From that point forward, the main project of Detroit Renaissance would become the construction of the Renaissance Center. Popularly known as the RenCen, it was supported by fifty-two corporate partners and a consortium of twenty-eight banks ready to fund loans, making it the largest urban real estate project ever assembled in the United States.¹⁶ And the biggest underwriter of the project was Ford, both the chairman and the motor company. They identified the land for the development on the riverfront east of the Cobo Center and south of Jefferson Avenue. John Portman, an archi tect whose reputation rested largely on the construction of shopping malls and hotels, appears to have been given free rein. The city’s administration, delighted to be the beneficiary of such a high level of corporate concern, moved to curtail the powers of the influential planning commission, which had expressed concerns about the design.17

The outcome remains today one of the most iconic landmarks in Detroit. RenCen consists of seven interconnected skyscrapers; the central tower, and the tallest one, is shaped like a cylinder, an homage to the city’s automobile engineering heritage. It was designed as a city within a city, if not a fortress. As Portman saw it, the Detroit downtown was dangerous, so the RenCen had to project an image of safety, an island of security in a dangerous sea: “a self-contained citadel,” commentators called it.¹⁸ And that is exactly what he achieved. It is hardly surprising, then, that RenCen has done very little to improve the downtown, precisely because it is an island that may as well have a moat around it. By and large, you get there by car, not on foot: you can drive in and out from the suburbs, park next to RenCen, and never set foot into the rest of Detroit. Pedestrians seeking to reach RenCen have to cross East Jefferson—that is, eight lanes of speeding cars. It can be done, but it’s an ordeal, and you certainly don’t feel invited to make the crossing.¹⁹ To make matters worse, the compound became a financial millstone for Ford in the years after it opened. Other businesses, expected to lease space, passed, and to prevent the prestige project from standing empty, the company ended up relocating a large fraction of its executives into the building. Eventually Ford allowed RenCen to go bankrupt, and it was sold off to property speculators.²⁰ In a final irony, it was General Motors who took over in 1996, and GM is still headquartered in RenCen today.²¹

Seeing his tremendous commitment to riverfront development, how was it possible that Henry Ford II could not get the downtown stadium built? All he needed was to overcome his younger brother’s skepticism and enter into a family partnership. A large stadium would have been the perfect complement to the RenCen. Henry had even been involved in the refinancing of the Houston Astrodome, a large downtown stadium. Was it sour grapes on the part of William Clay, who still resented the way that Henry had excluded him from the family business? Was it that Henry had no desire to share the glory of rebuilding the downtown with his brother, whom he had squeezed out of the family business?

As usual when it comes to postwar Detroit, the failure to build a downtown stadium, the departure of the Lions, and the subsequent departure of the Pistons cannot be disentangled from the politics of race. No matter how committed the—almost exclusively white—politicians were, no matter how meticulously they planned, after the city’s 1967 uprising, there was one narrative that dominated all others: the downtown was a scary place, and fans would stay away. An article in the Detroit Free Press from March 28, 1969, spelled it out with exemplary clarity:

Put simply, the case for putting the new stadium anywhere else than downtown Detroit rests on fear. People are reluctant of going into Detroit to see a ball game for fear of getting beaten up, or having their car stolen, or being robbed. By whom? By Negroes, of course. So people argue that the solution to the problem is to put the new stadium out in the clean white suburbs. I don’t agree. For what it’s worth, I think the stadium should be built downtown, along the riverfront site advocated by Mayor Cavanagh. For one thing, Negroes are as scared of coming out into the suburbs as white people are of going downtown. Perhaps more. So what is the racial composition of the crowd rooting for the Lions and Tigers? I don’t know. But once you start putting up a stadium in one place or another for racial reasons (veiled racial reasons, but racial reasons all the same) you start breaking down your fans into blacks and whites. Baseball’s got enough trouble right now without having to try to handle that one. If the big problem is fear of people going downtown, let’s design an anti-fear stadium. Then publicize it. Make the parking lot well lighted and put a fence around it. Hire a lot of guards to stand inside and outside the stadium. Do any number of things the police might suggest.22

A few years after the uprising, it was becoming clear to everyone: the suburbs were white and the city was majority black, a demographic fact that would dictate the terms of Detroit’s fate for decades to come. After years of supporting and electing progressive whites, who they hoped would recog nize and address their struggles, black residents, including black politicians, were finally coming to the fore in Detroit.

Coleman Young was born in Alabama in 1918; his family moved to Detroit along with the large number of black Southerners who joined the Great Migration that continued until the 1970s. He graduated from Eastern High School in Detroit, on Grand Boulevard on the East Side. The school was later renamed the Martin Luther King High School, and it has always been known for sports. When Coleman Young was a student in the 1930s, he played fullback for the football team. “I wasn’t very big and got beat up on every play,” he later recalled ruefully. He also remembered running cross-country, on a route that started at the school, took him to Belle Isle, and around the island before heading back to the school. His fitness would have stood him in good stead earlier in his childhood, when he competed for a backbreaking summer job at the age of ten or eleven: for fifty cents a day—a fortune, as far as he was concerned—the job required carrying fifty-pound blocks of ice to households at a time where private refrigerators where still an unheard-of luxury. The trouble was that most of the other kids in his neighborhood wanted the job as well, and Young lost out to an older kid with a lot more muscle: Joe Louis.23

As a young man, he worked at Ford, which had a policy of welcoming black workers, and at the U.S. Post Office. During the war, he served as a bombardier and navigator in the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen group, and in 1945, he was arrested for refusing to accept segregation at a base in Indiana.²⁴ We recount the story behind this incident in chapter 16.

From his days at Ford, where he joined the UAW, Young had a reputation as a communist sympathizer. In 1952, he was subpoenaed to testify before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). “I am not here to fight in any un-American activities,” he said at the hearing, “because I consider the denial of the right to vote to large numbers of people all over the South un-American.”²⁵ He refused to answer any questions, and his testimony included the following testy exchange:

Mr. [Frank] Tavenner [HUAC’s counsel]: You told us you were the executive secretary of the National Negro Congress.

Mr. Young: That word is “Negro,” not “Niggra.”

Mr. Tavenner: I said, “Negro.” I think you are mistaken.

Mr. Young: I hope I am. Speak more clearly.

Mr. [John] Wood [representative from Georgia]: I will appreciate it if you will not argue with counsel.

Mr. Young: It isn’t my purpose to argue. As a Negro, I resent the slurring of the name of my race.

Mr. Wood: You are here for the purpose of answering questions.

Mr. Young: In some sections of the country they slur.26

His political career developed, and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Young was an active political organizer on Detroit’s East Side. In 1960, he was elected as a delegate to help draft a new state constitution for Michigan and in 1964 was elected to the Michigan State Senate. In 1973, he ran for mayor of Detroit.

Young was not the first black candidate for mayor—that had been Richard Austin, who ran against Mary Beck in the 1969 primaries. Beck, a Democrat, was a powerful advocate of women’s rights and a pioneer for women in politics in Detroit. She was the first woman to be elected the city’s Common Council and the first to become president of that body.²⁷ After losing the primary, she said: “There was much more discrimination than I thought against a woman holding an executive position.”²⁸ That may be so, but her views on law and order may have played a more significant role. The Detroit Free Press observed that her platform consisted of a “strident ‘law and order’ theme, tinged by some of her supporters and by publicity with racial overtones.”²⁹ While she was carefully restrained in her public pronouncements on race, her supporters were crystal clear. One respondent to a Detroit Free Press survey said, “We need a mayor who will stand up for the white people. We don’t owe the n——s a goddamn dime; we’ve fed them since the Civil War.” Another commented, “We can’t possibly live with blacks; they want to take over.”³⁰

By 1969, about 44 percent of the city was black, and voting was highly polarized by race. Many white people said they simply weren’t prepared to see a black man become mayor. Black voters, who had supported white politicians in every election up until then, were beginning to demand and expect representation. Beck lost the primary to Roman Gribbs, another Democrat who became the leading white candidate. Gribbs had started his campaign as a moderate, but then tacked sharply to the right and made crime his main campaign issue in order to pick up Beck supporters. In the election itself, Gribbs won by 6,194 votes out of more than half a million votes cast. In an election dominated by the issue of race, the white man had won.31

This was an era of radical politics in the African American community. Any progress in securing civil rights had been bought at a heavy price, and Detroit was a hive of revolutionary thought and activism.³² In response, Gribbs sanctioned the creation of a special unit within the Detroit Police Department: Stop The Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets (STRESS). STRESS targeted black communities and used highly questionable tactics to do so. A favorite ploy was the “decoy operation,” where a police officer tried to entrap potential criminals in an undercover sting.³³ It was also brutal. During its existence, it’s worth mentioning again, STRESS shot and killed twenty-four men, twenty-two of whom were African American.³⁴ Even after a Wayne County sheriff deputy, who happened to be black, was gunned down in his apartment by STRESS, white conservatives continued to support the crackdown. Many people thought of the city as a war zone, where brute and lethal force had to be tolerated.³⁵

However much some whites supported Gribbs, it was widely understood that he was “a ‘transitional’ mayor, preparing Detroit for black rule.”³⁶ It was no great surprise when he decided not to stand for a second term. Richard Austin had been as moderate as they come, but Coleman Young was no moderate. In 1973, he campaigned against the tactics of STRESS and its impact on black communities, which now commanded a majority in the city. To polarize things even further, his opponent, John Nichols, was the police commissioner who had implemented STRESS. Coleman Young won handily, taking 56 percent of the vote, which was mostly black but benefited from a significant minority contribution from liberal whites.

Heather Ann Thompson described the aftermath of the election thus:

As Young prepared to take office on January 6, 1973, he publicly issued “a warning to all dope pushers, rip-off artists and muggers [that] it’s time to leave Detroit. Hit the road! … I don’t give a damn if they’re black or white, if they wear super fly suits or blue suits with silver badges.” Ironically, however, the city’s criminal element did not take Young’s victory as its cue to abandon the city, but the city’s white population did—at least those whites with the economic means to flee. For the whites financially unable to participate in the post-1973 exodus, “There remain[ed] a virulent racial bias that many believe [to be Young’s] biggest challenge.” Coleman Young had, indeed, won the mayoralty, but his victory was qualified. For Detroit blacks, who had fought so hard first inside, then outside, and finally back inside of the system, the city now held promise. For Detroit whites, however, the events of 1967 to 1973, culminating in the election of Young, sent them flying out of the city and into the Republican fold.37