THE HOSTILE SUBURBS
There is a lovely park across the street from Dudley Randall’s house, on the west side of Detroit, but at three in the afternoon it was deserted. At the curb, almost directly opposite the house, two very tough-looking young men sat in a late-model Pontiac. They passed a bottle between them and gazed out the windows, as if they were waiting for someone.
I rang the bell and Dudley Randall had to open several locks to let me in. At seventy-four he was a stooped, tired-looking man with bifocals, dressed in a flannel shirt and khaki trousers. His living room was lined with books, the walls were covered with African art and there were National Geographic magazines and anthologies of poetry stacked on the coffee table. Above a bookcase I saw a plaque, signed by the mayor, proclaiming Randall the Poet Laureate of Detroit.
Randall looked out his front window and gestured at the car in front. “I moved across from the park because I thought it would be nice,” he said. “But those two sit there every day and drink whiskey. And then they urinate in the bushes.” He made a sad face, offered me a seat and took one himself.
Randall has lived his life with books. For years he was a librarian and poet-in-residence at Wayne State University. During that time he founded the Broadside Press, a forum for black poets. But now, retired, he doesn’t write anymore, nor does he bother much with literature. “I no longer find truth in the great poets or the great books,” he said. There was a pause. “I still read Tolstoy,” he added, and fell silent again.
“What’s it like being the Poet Laureate of Detroit?” I asked. Randall considered for a moment. “Poetry isn’t such a big thing in Detroit,” he said finally, in a flat tone.
“What do you think of the city?” I asked, trying hard to make conversation. Friends had told me that Dudley Randall was one of the smartest, most perceptive people in Detroit, but he seemed too discouraged to talk. He looked out the window at the car. “I want to move away,” he said. “I’d like to go someplace where it’s warm.”
A few weeks earlier, on a visit to the mayor’s office, I had noticed a poem of Randall’s, entitled “Detroit Renaissance,” which is dedicated to Coleman Young, hanging on a wall in the reception room. Now I asked Randall about it, and he rose slowly, returning with a slim volume of his work, which includes the poem. He sat in silence as I read it to myself.
Cities have died, have burned,
Yet phoenix-like returned
To soar up livelier, lovelier than before. Detroit has felt the fire
Yet each time left the pyre
As if the flames had power to restore.
Of what it was, and is—
A lovely, tree-laned town of peace and trade.
Hatred has festered here,
And bigotry and fear
Filled streets with strife and raised the barricade.
Wealth of a city lies,
Not in its factories,
Its marts and towers crowding to the sky,
But in its people who
Possess grace to imbue
Their lives with beauty, wisdom, charity.
You have those too long hid,
Who built the pyramids,
Who searched the skies and mapped the planets’ range,
Who sang the songs of grief
That made the whole world weep,
Whose Douglass, Malcolm, Martin rung in change.
The Indian, with his soul
Attuned to nature’s role;
The sons and daughters of Cervantes’ smile;
Pan Tadeysz’s children too
Entrust their fate to you;
Souls forged by Homer’s, Dante’s
Shakespeare’s, Goethe’s, Yeats’s style.
Together we will build
A city that will yield
To all their hopes and dreams so long deferred.
New faces will appear
Too long neglected here;
New minds, new means will build a brave new world.
“Do you still believe it?” I asked. “Will you ever be able to rebuild this city together?”
Randall looked at me and shrugged, a slow movement of tired shoulders. “I guess not,” said the Poet Laureate of Detroit. “All the white people have moved away.”
And that is the simple truth. The week I met with Randall, the Detroit papers published a University of Chicago study that found, to no one’s surprise, that the suburbs of the Motor City are the most segregated in the United States.
Many blacks look beyond the Eight Mile Road border and see America—an undifferentiated, uncaring world of suburban affluence where they are neither liked nor wanted. Actually, the almost four million people of the Metropolitan Detroit area—Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties—are subdivided by ethnicity. Macomb, to the northeast, is blue-collar territory; a large percentage of its people are second- and third-generation Polish and Italian refugees from Detroit. Oakland, to the northwest, is the second wealthiest American county among those with a population of over one million, and it is dominated by WASPs and, to a lesser extent, Jews. Detroit itself is located in Wayne County, whose population, outside the city, includes a good number of working-class southern whites, Hispanics, Arabs and ethnics.
In most ways the towns of the tri-county area have little in common; what they share is an estrangement from Detroit. Unlike the suburbs of other major cities, they are not bedroom communities. The average suburbanite almost never visits the city for any reason. As Arthur Johnson, head of the local NAACP, observed, Detroiters know they aren’t loved by their neighbors. During the early years of the great white exodus this antipathy was impersonal. It got a face in 1973, with the election of Mayor Coleman Young.
The problem started with Young’s inaugural address, in which he warned hoodlums (“whether they’re wearing blue uniforms or Superfly suits”) to “hit Eight Mile and keep on going.” The idea of Detroit policemen crossing the boundary didn’t seem to bother suburbanites, but they were mightily exercised by the prospect of a legion of Superfly badasses invading their turf.
A more politic mayor would have tried to mend fences, but Young is not a fence-mender. He dubbed his neighbors “the hostile suburbs” and mounted a campaign of verbal and political harassment that still goes on today. They responded with a hatred usually reserved for enemy heads of state—which, in a way, he is. The mention of the mayor’s name is enough to set off tirades from the ritzy salons of Grosse Pointe to the redneck suburbs—places such as Melvindale, “The Little Town with the Big Heart.”
Melvindale is a hamlet of modest, neatly tended tract houses, located not far from the Ford factories that employ many of its twelve thousand citizens. Like other working-class suburbs heavily dependent on the auto industry, it has experienced hard times since the seventies, although not so hard as the city of Detroit, where most of its people were born and raised.
The nerve center of Melvindale is Tom Coogan’s barbershop, a two-chair emporium with a homey, Mayberry feeling—bear rugs and stuffed moose heads on the wall, brown-and-white-checked linoleum on the floor, and a sign in the window: BURGLARS BEWARE. And, in back of a barber chair, over a Pinaud Clubman Talc advertisment, there is another sign: TOM COOGAN, MAYOR.
When I arrived at his shop, Mayor Coogan had a constituent in the chair and three more waiting for haircuts. Coogan is a genial, cautious man in a pale blue barber’s smock whose thick glasses give him a scholarly appearance. He was in the middle of trimming a sideburn when a woman with a Tennessee accent came in to complain about overgrown weeds in a lot near her house. A believer in direct action, Coogan put down his scissors and called the police chief on the walkie-talkie he keeps next to his barber tools. He spoke briefly, then picked up his shears once again. “The violation is in the mail,” he told the lady.
“Can you imagine Coleman Young doing something like that?” I asked, hoping to get a rise. I got one. A waiting customer snorted. “You have to change your color, you want any help from him,” he said.
“No, Coleman is responsive,” said Coogan with collegial solidarity.
“Shit, that son of a bitch don’t even take care of black people, let alone white,” said another man. “Back in the fifties, Detroit was a beautiful city. You could get drunk in Detroit.”
Coogan snipped reflectively. “The city started deteriorating when they took off STRESS [a tough police unit, established after the 1967 riot, which deployed white cops as decoys in mostly black areas]. It kept people honest, being subject to search. Now everybody packs a piece downtown.”
The old man in the chair, who was getting a marine crew cut, cleared his throat. “Back in the old days when I was in Detroit there were colored but they knew their place. They knew right from wrong. They wanted to work then, not like today.” The others said “Damn right” and “Goddamn Young,” but Coogan snipped away in silence.
Except when Tom Coogan is conducting municipal business, his barbershop is a male preserve, a sort of club where fellas drop in every so often to get their ears raised whether they need it or not. They are talkers, and they weren’t at all averse to chewing the fat with a visiting writer, especially when the subject was the city they once lived in and now view as an alien colony.
“Detroit is real squalor,” drawled one of the regulars. “All Young cares about is the great big monuments he’s building himself.”
“Shit, they enjoy the environment they’re in. That’s the way they are,” said another man.
The blue phone that Coogan uses for official business rang. He picked it up and said, “Mayor Coogan.” As he spoke, the old fellow in the barber chair said, “This here is the only place in Michigan where you can insult the mayor. Ol’ Tom’s the best mayor we ever had. Even the best ain’t too damn good, but he’s the best anyway.” It got a laugh, and Coogan, hand over the receiver, nodded in agreement.
The mayor completed his conversation, finished the flattop and another man climbed into the chair for a six-dollar haircut. “Every community has crime and drug problems,” Coogan said, “and we’ve got our share. But we try to keep Detroit from spilling over into Melvindale. We run police cars up and down Schaffer Road at night—that’s our border with Detroit—and we feel it’s a deterrent. We’ve been able to keep the crime under control out here.”
“Control, hell,” said one of the men. “My insurance guy called the other day and said, ‘Bill, we’ve got to raise your premiums because of Detroit.’ ”
“Hell, the insurance companies will use any excuse,” said the fellow in the chair.
“Yeah, well ninety-five percent of prisoners are black,” said Bill. “Now, what does that tell ya?”
“Where is the mom and dad, that’s what I wonder,” said a young man who had come into the shop and assumed one of the Naugahyde seats along the wall.
“Hell, they can’t even count their kids. I used to walk three miles ever’ day to Southwestern High School, for cripes sakes,” said Bill.
The mayor snipped away and said nothing.
“Last time I was in Detroit, some big black come up and asked me for some money,” said the young man. “I told him, ‘If you ain’t out of here in two seconds I’ll kill ya.’ But I’ll tell ya something, I wouldn’t drive my car down Woodward Avenue today. Them big black dudes standing down there—shit.”
A heavyset middle-aged man named Carl, wearing a soiled T-shirt and work pants, came in to the shop and was enthusiastically greeted. He is considered the town wit, and he immediately went into his routine—a series of jokes about Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis, dagos and A-rabs, and Greeks who, according to him, have a universal passion for anal sex. Then, surprisingly, he offered a minority opinion on Coleman Young.
“I think Coleman’s good,” he said. “He’s fast, forward and he tells it like it is.”
“Shit,” said the young man, whose name was Angelo. “You’re the first white guy I ever heard say something good about him.”
“Yeah, well where was my car stolen, Detroit or Melvindale?” Carl demanded. “People are afraid to go into Detroit just because of the fear instilled by the news media. Blacks are human, you know. Just don’t go looking for problems and you’ll be all right.”
“This guy is crazy,” said Angelo. “He’ll go anywhere. I ride with him and I start to shake. Shit, Detroit, man. My old house is gone. Wiped out.”
“Yeah, well you fuckin’ I-talians abused the houses. Blacks didn’t want them no more. You left them a ghetto,” said Carl.
Angelo was furious. “Tell them about that incident on Belle Isle—you never tell that to anybody,” he almost shouted.
“Shit, all that happened is some blacks hassled my car over on Belle Isle. They didn’t hurt nobody,” said Carl.
Mayor Coogan continued snipping, and said nothing.
“1967?” said Bill. “I was over at the Stroh’s Brewery when the riot broke out. Blacks and whites were shooting each other all over the place. They say that only forty-three were killed but that’s a damned lie—I counted more’n a hundred in the hallway at Receiving Hospital.”
“Fuckin’ blacks, man,” someone said, and the others shook their heads. “Fuckin’ Coleman Young.”
Carl, the liberal, sensed he was losing his audience. “You’re from Israel, right?” he said to me. “Did you hear the one about the Jewish Santa Claus? He asks the kids for presents.” The men laughed, happy to be back on familiar ground.
“I’ll tell you one thing about Detroit,” said Mayor Coogan, snipping away at his customer’s neck. “I don’t know about this other stuff, but it’s the best damn sports town in the world. I think we can all agree on that.”
Not every politician in suburban Detroit is as circumspect as the barber-mayor of Melvindale. Few, on the other hand, are as outspoken as Brooks Patterson, who served as prosecutor of Oakland County for sixteen years before stepping down in 1988, and made a career out of Detroit-bashing.
Patterson’s headquarters was the Oakland County courthouse, a modernistic building set down in the vacant land in the northern tip of Pontiac. On the day I visited him, the halls were quiet. A dorky-looking young couple wearing his-and-hers matching dental braces walked hand in hand, holding a marriage certificate. Outside a courtroom, a white lawyer and a black defendant were in conference, the lawyer saying, “I can’t promise, I can’t promise, I can’t promise …” while his client peered off into the distance. But there was no tension in the air, none of the hurly-burly normally associated with places where people’s fates are determined. Clearly, in Brooks Patterson’s domain, things were under control.
Patterson himself appeared relaxed and jocular. He was only a few months away from voluntary retirement and there was an end-of-the-semester informality about him. Nearing fifty, he was wearing a sport shirt, a boating jacket and moccasins without socks. A boyish-looking man with a round face and a dry “heh, heh, heh” kind of laugh, he had the air of shrewd efficiency normally associated with the security chief of a medium-sized corporation.
Patterson, like his nemesis, Coleman Young, is known to local journalists as “good copy.” One reporter who came to interview him found a miniature electric chair, complete with a battery-charged shock, on display. To another, who asked him if he would be defending felons in private practice, he replied that he wouldn’t “unless they’re members of the family.” But, despite his sense of humor, Brooks Patterson is a highly unpopular man in the city of Detroit, where he is regarded as the symbol of suburban racism.
Patterson considers the charge unfair. “I’m color-blind,” he said. “But out here we don’t plea-bargain on breaking and entering cases, assault and other violent crimes, and black defendants don’t like it. Oakland County is less than ten percent black but eighty five percent of the jail population is black.”
I wrote down the statistic, but the prosecutor suddenly seemed unsure. He picked up a phone and asked an assistant for the racial breakdown of the county’s prisoners. “Actually, that number is about fifty percent,” he corrected himself in a same-difference tone of voice.
It is rare for a suburban politician to talk so specifically about blacks. In the established code, they are “Detroiters,” and whites are “suburbanites.” A few years ago, when Patterson became embroiled in one of his epic battles with Coleman Young, these terms came into wide public use.
That was back in 1984, when the Detroit Tigers won the World Series. Following the final game, gangs of drunken revelers celebrated by attacking passersby and burning a car. The incident, which drew national attention, was a major embarrassment to the city, and Young blamed it on his neighbors.
“When Coleman Young talked about marauding gangs coming in from the suburbs, I checked the figures,” said Patterson. “It turned out that on that same day, thirty of the last thirty arrests in Southfield [an Oakland County city that abuts Detroit] were of Detroiters. Now, is that racial? Bullshit. The fact is, Detroiters present a serious law enforcement problem to Oakland County.”
Although he denies being a racist, Patterson began his public career as the attorney for NAG (the National Action Group), a Pontiac-based organization dedicated to fighting school busing. His high profile in that struggle won him election as prosecutor in 1972. Twice he led unsuccessful state-wide petition drives to institute capital punishment, and he established a policy of refusing to plea-bargain in cases involving serious crimes.
He also developed an appetite for political advancement. A hard-line Republican in a basically Democratic state, three times he ran for higher office—governor, senator and attorney general—and three times he lost. In each race, his base of support was conservative suburbanites, many of them former liberals, who applauded his law-and-order attacks on Detroit.
“In this county, robbery is a crime,” said Patterson. “In Detroit, it’s an occupation. It’s warfare in the city, it absolutely is. A baby born in Detroit has a bigger statistical chance of being killed than a soldier in World War Two. If I was the mayor, I’d call in the National Guard.”
I mentioned that, in their defense, Detroiters often say that there is crime in the suburbs, too, but Patterson wasn’t having any. “We’ve got a crime problem? Bullshit! We have crime, sure; there’s more than a million people here. But by percentage, we’re light-years ahead of Detroit when it comes to protecting the public.”
Hundreds of speeches to Kiwanis Clubs and Rotaries have given Patterson a ready command of the statistics. “In Wayne County in 1987, out of a population of two-point-two million, there were close to one thousand homicides,” he said. “Here, in Oakland County, with one-point-one million, there were between forty-five and fifty.”
The great suburban nightmare is that the violence of Detroit will spill out beyond Eight Mile Road. In the mid-eighties, Grosse Pointe, which abuts the city, tried to build a “flood-control wall” along the border, and the town of Dearborn passed an ordinance forbidding the use of its parks to nonresidents.
“The walls will be up for a long time,” he said. “Is there hatred between us and them? Okay, I don’t deny it. We see ourselves as a target. In this situation you see the evidence of one man’s hatred for the honkies. He’s the racist. Things will quiet down when Coleman leaves.”
This is the predominant suburban feeling—that whites are the victims, not the perpetrators, of racism. People like Brooks Patterson, who was born and raised in Detroit, view themselves as innocent refugees and regard their native city with a mixture of contempt and anger. They do not accept the notion that Detroit is still the big city; to them, it is an irrelevancy.
“Coleman calls the suburbs ‘cornfields,’ ” Patterson said angrily. “But in fact, in no sense are we dependent on Detroit. They are dependent on us. The truth is, Detroit has had its day. I don’t give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed Eight Mile again I wouldn’t be bereft of anything.”
“What about the quality of life for Detroiters?” I wondered. Patterson looked at me as if I were simpleminded. “It’s like the Indians on the reservation,” he said. “Those who can will leave Detroit. Those who can’t will get blankets and food from the government men in the city.”
Brooks Patterson sees the post-Coleman era as a time of potential rapprochement between the cornfield and the battlefield. “But they’ve got to see that crime is the bottom line,” said the prosecutor of Oakland County. “They have to kick ass and take names. Without getting crime under control you have no solution. All the city’s problems have their origin in a lack of safety.”
“And until they do?”
Patterson smiled bleakly and rubbed his hands together. “Until they do, you move to the suburbs and defend yourself,” he said.
Moving to the suburbs isn’t so simple though, even for blacks who want to. Open housing statutes make it legally impossible to select your neighbors and make sure they stay selected, but there are ways. Detroit’s suburbs did not get to be the most segregated in the country by accident.
A generation ago, residential separation was simpler. When I was growing up in Detroit, Grosse Pointe had a “point system” to keep out undesirables. Prospective buyers were rated by skin color, accent, religion and other criteria, including a “typically American way of life.” Under the system, blacks, Mexicans and Orientals were automatically given a failing grade, as were virtually all Jews and southern Europeans.
In Dearborn, the seat of the Ford empire, racism was less scientific, but equally virulent. Mayor Orville Hubbard, a vocal segregationist, was kept in office for more than thirty years by an admiring populace composed of ethnic Italians, Poles and southern whites, who subscribed to his antiblack attitude. “I just don’t believe in integration,” he said in 1967. “When that happens, along comes socializing with the whites, intermarriage and then mongrelization.”
This sort of blatant race-baiting has all but disappeared from the public discourse of metropolitan Detroit. The fact is, civil rights legislation and black political activism have chipped away at many of the institutionalized forms of overt racism. In the summer of 1988, for example, Dearborn was forced to accept its first black police recruit. A smattering of blacks now live there and in Detroit’s other working-class suburbs. Even Grosse Pointe has a handful of wealthy black residents.
The main obstacles to integration are economic and social. Realtors say that there is no place in the Detroit area today where a black can’t buy a home, but the cost is often prohibitive. The most modest white neighborhoods in the suburbs are more than twice as expensive as comparable areas in the city—precisely because they are white. And those blacks who can afford to move often feel unwelcome.
Nowhere is this truer than in Warren, a small city just to the north of Detroit, inhabited largely by Poles and Italians. Twenty years ago, a mixed couple tried to move in, and police had to be called to protect them from outraged mobs. A few years later, the city fathers turned down badly needed HUD money because it meant building integrated housing. The only important black institution there is the Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery, the Metro area’s largest black burial grounds, and most Warrenites want to keep it that way.
“The attitude isn’t as much racist as one of fear,” said Richard Sabaugh, a county commissioner and public relations executive who as a Warren city councilman helped lead the HUD fight. “People don’t see every black as bad. But the image of Detroit is of a decaying, crime-ridden city headed by a mayor who makes racist remarks. We view the values of people in Detroit as completely foreign. To us it’s like a foreign country and culture. The language is different and the way people think there is different. We just want to live in peace. And we feel that anybody coming from Detroit is going to cause problems.”
Sabaugh, who ran unopposed in his last contest, faithfully mirrors the views of many of his constituents. “It’s all one complex—blacks, Coleman Young, crime, drugs, Detroit. People feel they’ve been driven out once, and it could occur again.”
Considering the conditions in the city, I wondered if anyone felt compassion for its residents. Sabaugh seemed amazed at the notion.
“Any sentiment to help Detroiters? Not at all. I’ve never heard that. If you ever asked to raise taxes to help Detroit, it would go down fifteen to one. Guilt to help people who won’t help themselves? That’s a thought that’s not even tolerated. If they saw a young kid in a destitute situation, there might be some compassion. But otherwise, no. There is no feeling of pity for Detroit in the suburbs. Maybe the bottom line is they’ve given up on Detroit. You want to hear what people think, the best place is the senior citizen picnic. Most of those people used to live in the city. Ask them how they feel about Detroit,” Sabaugh suggested.
The Warren perspective was on display at the annual outing, held in a wood pavilion in one of the city’s verdant parks. The seniors were bland, mild-eyed veterans of the auto factories and their equally bland wives. The men wore polyester sportsclothes, the ladies sported Lurleen Wallace bouffants. They played cards at long wooden tables, or lined up for free eye examinations and blood pressure checks at booths along the sides. Mayor Ronald Bonkowski moved among the old people shaking hands and exchanging family gossip. Among the thousand or so picnickers, there wasn’t a single black.
At a table in the center of the room, two old men, who turned out to be brothers, sat in stoic silence while their wives chatted happily. They were glad to divert themselves by talking about their old hometown.
“It’s a war zone across Eight Mile rode,” said one, a grizzled former toolmaker named Steve. “They should put up a big wall, like in Berlin. I’m afraid to go back there—it’s like going into some Russian-held city. You don’t know if you’re coming back alive.” The women, who had fallen silent, nodded in agreement, but Joseph, Steve’s brother, shook his head.
“I’m an old union man,” he said, “and one thing I learned is that you have to get along with blacks. It’s worse to be a bigot than a black. It’s against the law to be a bigot, and it’s not against the law to be black. I think we’re better off in this country because we got blacks, Chinese, Japanese …”
Steve cut him off impatiently. “What’s wrong with the colored? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. No one ever taught them how to live. They destroy their own houses. They should live in a tent, like a Boy Scout, until they learn to live in a house. They can’t get it into their head that a house should last more than five years.”
“Well, I built a house on Waldo, and it’s still there, paying taxes,” said Joseph.
“Yeah, well maybe you should go back there and live with them,” said Steve, and the women giggled at the absurdity of the suggestion.
“I don’t mind living next to them,” said Joseph. “In time, people will recognize that the black fella is just like them.”
“Maybe they’re just like you, but they sure as hell ain’t just like me,” said Steve. “And I don’t want any out here in Warren. You want to live with ’em, go right ahead. You know what you are?” He hesitated before continuing; this was his brother, after all. But anger overcame family sentiment. “I hate to say it, Joseph, but you’re nothing but a damn liberal.”
Twenty-five years ago, Detroit prided itself on being in the vanguard of American liberalism; today, the term has become an epithet. One of the few places where it is still respectable, if not exactly fashionable, is Southfield, often considered to be the “Jewish” suburb just north of Detroit.
When I left for Israel in the summer of 1967, the majority of Detroit’s eighty thousand Jews were clustered in the northwest corner of the city. Dozens of synagogues, religious schools, community centers and delis dotted the areas’s main commercial avenues, and families lived in spacious brick homes built along quiet, tree-lined streets. But the riot touched off a mass exodus; six months later, when I came home for a visit, I literally didn’t recognize the place. Not a single one of my friends’ families was still there.
Most of them had moved to Southfield or even farther north, to the WASP suburbs of Birmingham and West Bloomfield. Only a few years before Jews felt unwelcome in such places, but in the racially charged atmosphere they now had the primary qualification for acceptance: if blacks considered Jews “almost white,” WASPs seemed to feel that they were “white enough.” Seemingly overnight, synagogues and day schools sprouted in the cornfields of suburbia, while, in northwest Detroit, abandoned temples became AME churches and pastrami parlors were transformed into barbecue joints.
In the eighties, Southfield became the new downtown of white Detroit. Glittering gold-painted business towers and massive shopping centers tipped the commercial balance away from the city. In the fall of 1988, there were 23 million square feet of office space in Southfield and another 1.5 million were under construction—more than in the entire city of Detroit, whose population is ten times larger.
For three generations, blacks have followed Jews northward, and the pattern is now being repeated in Southfield. In 1970, there were less than one hundred blacks in the town. By 1980, the number had grown to about eight thousand. Today, the city administration estimates that there are twenty thousand—about 20 percent of the population—making Southfield the most integrated city in the area.
Ironically, it is also the least popular with Detroiters. They see it as their primary competition for the black middle class and many regard the black yuppies who live there as defectors. Moreover, the huge Northland shopping center, whose stores are white-owned and patronized largely by blacks, has become a symbol of suburban commercial exploitation. It is a mark of social consciousness not to shop there. Arthur Johnson told me proudly that he hasn’t bought more than a pair of shoes north of Eight Mile Road in years. Federal circuit judge Damon Keith, who lives in Detroit and whose court is in Cincinnati, prefers to shop in Ohio rather than drive a mile or two to Northland.
This antipathy has little to do with the Jews; Detroit has been remarkably free of the acrimony that has often characterized black-Jewish relations in Chicago and New York. Partly this is because Arab store owners in the city have become the main focus of black resentment; partly because the Jewish community, especially its leader, multimillionaire Max Fisher, has been active in supporting Detroit projects. And a good deal of credit goes to Coleman Young, who is something of a philo-Semite.
During the 1940s and 50s, when Young was involved in radical union politics, many of his associates were Jews who supported him in battles with the UAW establishment. In office, he has reciprocated by appointing several to key city positions. From them Young learned to appreciate Jewish cooking and Jewish humor. Throughout his incumbency, he has gone out of his way to encourage Jews—even those who now live in the suburbs—to remain involved in the life of the city.
There is, in fact, more intimacy and complexity in the Jewish-black relationship than in any other. “We were always closer to Jews than to the others,” said Arthur Johnson, “and we miss them more.” Indeed, for generations, Jews were the only community willing to sell homes to blacks, and to contemplate living next to them. But each time, as poor blacks arrived in the wake of the middle class, contemplation gave way to flight.
The cost of these repeated exoduses—in new homes, synagogues and institutions—has been crippling. This time, the Jewish community is trying to make a stand. Its Federation offers grants to young Jewish couples who buy homes in Southfield and neighboring Oak Park. “It’s not so much that Jews still believe in integration,” a Federation activist said. “We just don’t want to run again.”
Southfield officials are extremely concerned that the efforts to maintain a stable white population will fail. “The media say that we will be a throw-away city in ten to twenty years,” said Southfield mayor Donald Fracassi. “I’m frightened, I admit it. But I’m not about to let the city fall without a fight. We understand the cost of a city becoming all black, and we’re ready to take on the threat of resegregation. If we lose, at least they’ll have to say we tried.”
The Southfield strategy is based on another irony—the only important city in the Metro area that has declared integration to be a policy goal wants to maintain it by recuiting whites and steering blacks away. “Our approach to racial problems is unorthodox,” admitted city manager Robert Block. “Since we’re naturally attractive to blacks because of our quality of life and the fact that they feel welcome here, our target market is the white community.”
The man in charge of implementing this strategy is Nimrod Rosenthal, a transplanted Israeli who chain-smokes Winstons and mixes business jargon with liberal platitudes in fast, Hebrew-accented English. He was hired to use the expertise he acquired as a marketing whiz for the Hudson’s Department Store chain to help sell the city to white people.
Part of Rosenthal’s plan is based on the Shaker Heights model. The Cleveland suburb has fought resegregation by actively directing urban blacks to other suburbs, and Nimrod Rosenthal admitted that Southfield is considering doing the same. The idea is to set up a nonprofit office in Detroit that would help those who want to leave find housing elsewhere in Oakland County. In late 1988, the notion was still under discussion, and Southfield made little effort to publicize it; it is not the kind of program likely to be popular among its less liberal neighbors. Its officials were unmoved, however, by possible negative reactions. “They can’t hurt us,” said one. “Fair housing is the law of the land.”
Southfield’s leaders were counting on blacks to go along. “The minorities here understand that if we can’t maintain a racial balance, they will be the losers,” said the mayor. “Their kids will go to poor schools and live in filthy neighborhoods. So the minorities will have to get out of the comfort zone, and move to other suburbs.”
If the Shaker Heights plan represents push, Southfield has also mounted an impressive advertising campaign to pull in young whites. Its centerpiece is a series of thirty-second television spots that Nimrod Rosenthal screened for me on his office VCR.
The ads depict aspects of life in Southfield—young couples dining in fine restaurants, relaxed businessmen able to drive to their offices within minutes, happy children frolicking in a safe schoolyard, youthful families walking hand in hand across well-tended lawns with brick ranch houses in the background. After watching half a dozen of the commercials it became clear that they had a common denominator—the only blacks visible were little girls and light-skinned women.
When I pointed this out, Rosenthal seemed a bit defensive. He continued to run the ads, and after a few minutes he shouted, “Hey, there’s a black guy,” in an excited tone. He rewound the tape and played it over, so I could see a fleeting frame of young black executive sitting in a plush office.
On and on went the commericals. Handsome yuppies playing tennis, shopping, clinking glasses of shining crystal, all against a background of glossy neo-rock. No one who saw the ads could possibly have guessed that nearly half the students in the Southfield schools are black, or that elderly people make up a large part of the city’s population, or that there are more than twenty thousand blacks (not to mention ten thousand Chaldeans and Arabs) already living in the suburb.
“I have to overcome the perception of what whites think of as an integrated city,” Rosenthal explained. “People are interested in quality of life.” This, of course, means a quantity of whites. Southfield’s marketing director has a product to sell—and who can blame him if he doesn’t want to hurt sales by giving prospective buyers the idea that there are blacks living in Detroit’s most integrated suburb.
Nobody will ever do a commercial like that about Hamtramck, although there are probably more blond-haired, blue-eyed people there than Nimrod Rosenthal ever dreamed of. The little city is, like Highland Park, an island, surrounded on all sides by Detroit, which expanded around it. Its diverse population includes blacks, Albanians, Ukrainians and other Slays—but Hamtramck is, first and foremost, a Polish town.
Unlike Chicago and other large northern cities that have experienced suburban flight, Detroit has not retained strong ethnic enclaves. The city is, as Chief Hart observed, one big ghetto all the way to its borders. Aside from a small barrio on the southwest side and a few areas on the riverfront and the outer extremities, all its neighborhoods are heavily black. Only Hamtramck, in the city but not a part of it, remains to remind people what Detroit was like thirty years age.
In those day, the city was dotted with corner shot-and-a-beer joints—ethnic taverns like Lillie’s. A summer storm was raging outside when I walked in, and the patrons at the bar were in the midst of giving the weather a Hamtramck spin. When thunder rolled overhead, the young bartender said, “When I was little, my ma used to tell me that thunder is Jesus bowling.”
“Yeah,” said a man in a blue work shirt, seated at the bar. “I heard that. And the lightning is the scoreboard lighting up.”
“God, you guys,” a young woman in narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and a beehive hairdo said in mock disgust. “Jeez, bowling!”
“Hey,” the bartender said, “I’m a Polack. Whaddaya want?”
“Yeah, well waddaya think I am, Japanese?” quipped the woman, and the guys at the bar, dressed in factory clothes and baseball hats, laughed and raised their glasses in a toast to ethnic solidarity.
Dave Uchalik walked in during the banter, sat down at the bar and chugged a Budweiser. He is a pale man in his early thirties and he was dressed according to local custom, in a work shirt and Tigers baseball cap. But unlike his father, who worked at the nearby (and now defunct) Dodge Main for forty-one years, or Lillie’s other patrons, who are still on the line at the GM plant that took its place, Uchalik is no auto worker. He is the leader of a rock band called the Polish Muslims, the founder of what he calls, facetiously, the Hamtramck sound.
“Hamtramck is the Liverpool of Detroit,” Uchalik said, draining his Bud. “This is heavy-duty industrial territory. When I was a kid, my father and I both wanted me to escape the factories. He said, ‘Get an education.’ But I figured I’d just play the guitar instead.”
Uchalik is a pretty good guitar player, and the Polish Muslims do their share of straightforward rock, but his real forte is as a lyricist and commentator on his native city and its folkways. “We do a kind of Polish rock ’n’ roll,” he said, wiping his granny glasses on his blue work shirt. “For example, we’ve got a song called ‘Love Polka Number 9’ which we sing to the tune of ‘Love Potion Number 9.’ That’s one of our big numbers.”
Dave Uchalik’s version sounds nothing like the Clovers’:
I went out Friday night with you know who,
That bobcia with the size 12 bowling shoe.
She feeds me kielbasa and she makes me drink that wine
And then she likes to dance that Love Polka Number 9.
Uchalik’s lyric vision of his hometown comes from his days at St. Florian’s school and his nights in the bars along Joseph Campau Avenue, the city’s main strip, where Polka bands and Polish dancing are as natural as country music in Nashville. Growing up in the Motown era, he gravitated to r&b as well, and the result is a unique fusion, possible only in the Warsaw of Wayne County.
“I use the things that go with this place,” he said. “Polish foods, bowling, overweight people, the polka, bobcias—that’s Polish for ‘old women.’ ” Although his parents speak Polish fluently, Uchalik admits that he knows only a smattering of the language—just enough to get by in a town of less than twenty-five thousand that still has a Polish language newspaper.
“As far as the name—the Polish Muslims—is concerned, we were just sitting around a bar a few years ago having some cocktails when we came up with it. There was nothing racial about it. A few older people were offended and once a guy jumped on the stage and tried to take the microphone away from me, but most people think the name and the songs are funny. After all, if you can laugh at yourself, you can laugh at anybody.”
Uchalik’s sense of humor is nothing if not irreverent. When Pope John Paul came to town a few years ago, he composed a tune for the Pontiff, “Traveling Pope,” to the tune of Ricky Nelson’s “Traveling Man.” “I like to think of the pope listening to that one in the Vatican,” Uchalik said, popping the top on another Bud. (Uchalik was not the only one inspired by the pope’s visit. A local car dealer, Woodrow W. Woody, caught a video shot of His Holiness waving to the crowds in front of his Pontiac dealership. In the picture, the pope’s arms are extended in what appears to be a benediction of the auto showroom, and it has become a fixture of Woody’s advertising.)
The Muslims, who also feature some female backup singers called the Muslimettes, play mostly around Hamtramck, with occasional gigs in Detroit and the suburbs. A local bandleader, Big Daddy Marshall Lachkowski, has been helping them, and the band has a loyal following. Several of the guys at the bar smiled in recognition as Uchalik recited another of his favorite compositions, “Bowling USA,” which is sung to the tune of the Beachboys’ “Surfin USA.”
I’m getting my new ball drilled, I’m gettin’ it back real soon.
They’re waxing down the alleys, they can’t wait for June.
I’m watching Beat the Champ now, you can’t tear me away.
Tell yo mamma you’re bowling, bowling USA.
“That’s Hamtramck all right,” said the bartender as he came over with a refill. “Polacks and bowling balls.”
The people at Lillie’s are not the only ones proud of their ethnic heritage. Hamtramck’s official slogan is “A touch of Europe in America.” Surrounded by the Third World city of Detroit, it is an island of Second World sensibility. The street in front of the city hall is named Lech Walesa Avenue, and there is a letter from the Solidarity leader on display on mayor Bob Kozaren’s office wall.
Kozaren is a St. Ladislaus boy who has been in office since 1980, and his walls are festooned with Hamtramckania. There is a picture of its Little League championship team making an appearance on the Lawrence Welk show (“This is a great sports town, home of Rudy Tomjanovich and Jean Hoxie”), a bronzed record of “There’s a City Called Hamtramck” by local favorite Ted Gomulka (“Mitch Ryder was a Hamtramck boy, too”), and lots of framed photographs of American presidents on state visits to the Polish capital of Michigan.
“There is a saying, ‘If you want to be president, you have to come to Hamtramck,” said Kozaren. “FDR, Truman, they’ve all been here. JFK was invited for the first time because of his Polish brother-in-law, Prince Radziwill. And when Dukakis came this year, we spelled out his name in Polish sausage. He took a part of it back to his hotel room with him. We got into the Guinness Book of World Records with the world’s largest kielbasa.”
Kozaren is a strong Democrat in the old UAW mold and, unlike other leaders of the towns around Detroit, he had nothing but praise for Coleman Young. Hamtramck was badly hurt by the contraction of the auto industry in the seventies and the closing of Dodge Main. Kozaren and Young collaborated on a plan to open a GM plant on the site of the old factory, on a plot of land partly in Hamtramck and partly in Detroit. This entailed demolishing the Poletown neighborhood, a project that aroused emotional opposition from its mostly elderly residents; but Kozaren believes that it helped save his city. “On the whole, it was the best thing that could have happened,” he said.
Coleman Young played a big part in the Poletown drama, and Kozaren is grateful. “Coleman is a dedicated mayor,” he said. “Some of the suburbs condemn him because he keeps Detroit in mind. But people didn’t leave him with much. He came along after the riots, and everyone wanted to strip Detroit clean. They even took the ball teams. People around here want to separate the suburbs from the city, but it just won’t work.”
One reason that the Poletown demolition generated so much emotion was the fear that it would lead to a loss of ethnic identity. But that doesn’t seem to have happened. The small city looks as if it has been caught in a time warp—its modest frame houses are immaculately tended, its downtown is a long strip of mom-and-pop restaurants, five-and-dimes and friendly taverns. Six churches—four Roman Catholic, one Ukrainian Catholic and one Polish National Catholic—anchor its neighborhoods.
In contrast to the demolished business streets of Detroit, commerce bustles in Hamtramck, and the booster spirit is alive and well. Once a week, its middle-aged merchants gather at the Polish Century Club to eat middle-American cuisine (sample menu: hot canned chop suey with boiled rice, white bread, red Jell-O and milk), sing “Vive Le Rotary” out of a stenciled songster, and listen to motivational lectures. There are outings (“Tuesdee at the yat club, for a swim in da lake”), softball leagues with teams sponsored by sausage companies, church bazaars and, every September, a monster ethnic festival that attracts tens of thousands of former Hamtramck people who now live in Warren and other Polish-American enclaves east of Detroit.
“Growing up in Hamtramck is like growing up in a fraternity,” said Kozaren. “People may leave, but they retain their ties. It’s a city where we have sidestepped time.”
Not every member of the fraternity is happy with the quaint old-world flavor. One dissenter is Bob Zwolak, whose combination bicycle shop and weekly newspaper, The Hamtramck Times, shares a block on Joseph Campau with the Ukrainain Reliance Credit Union and the General Sikorski PLAV Post #10.
A strong critic of the local establishment, Zwolak uses his paper to attack perceived malfeasance—even his own. In the summer of 1988, the Times carried a front-page exposé of a candidate for Wayne County Clerk who sent registration notices to deceased voters. According to the paper the culprit was—Bob Zwolak. “Of course, there’s nothing illegal about it,” he explained. “The list comes off the registrar’s computer. So a candidate wouldn’t necessarily know who had died.”
“In other words, you had no way of knowing.”
“Well,” he said, looking sheepish, “I was the city clerk. But what the hell, I believe in freedom of the press.”
Zwolak struck me as an honest man, and I asked him how his city had managed to hang on to its identity in the midst of so much suburban flight. People at City Hall had portrayed Hamtramck as an open, friendly city, a picture that caused him to laugh out loud.
“There are about six hundred thousand Poles in Michigan,” he said. “That’s forty percent of all the people who actually vote in this state. We are the biggest ethnic group in Michigan except for the blacks. And Hamtramck is the symbolic center, the capital. Our officials judge people by their ethnic background. You’re Polish, no problem. But other people want something, forget it. No way. This should be America, not an extension of a foreign country. If the church wants ethnicity, that’s fine—but not the entire municipal government. What other ethnic group is still left except the blacks? Only the Poles.
“Hey, when I was a kid I lived for a few years in California,” said the crusading publisher. “And you know what? While I was out there, I realized something about Hamtramck. It isn’t reality—it’s Disneyland.”
The Polish Disneyland was in full swing on Labor Day, when Hamtramck threw its annual ethnic festival. Pierogi and kielbasa stands lined the streets, and women in babushkas carried white cardboard boxes from the Oaza bakery in both hands. On an improvised bandstand near the corner of Joseph Campau and Cannif, Dave Uchalik and the Polish Muslims were entertaining the members of the fraternity.
“Yak shmash, Hamtramck,” he called, and the crowd cheered. He turned to his drummer. “Ready, Yash?”
“Ready, Stash,” said the drummer, and the band struck up “Love Polka Number 9.” People began to dance, heavy work shoes clomping on the pavement in time to some internal metronome unheard by the average ear. Uchalik pranced around the stage, the Muslimettes banged tambourines and Polish flags flapped in the damp breeze.
A thin black man in a white robe and turbanlike hat stood on the corner, next to Tondryk’s Electric, surveying the scene. Although blacks account for perhaps 15 percent of Hamtramck’s population, there were few at the festival, and his outfit aroused my curiosity.
“Excuse me, but are you a Muslim by any chance?” I asked.
He waited a while before answering. “Yeah man, from Kansas City,” he finally said, tugging on his scraggly beard.
“These guys are called the Polish Muslims,” I told him, and he digested the information slowly.
“Ain’t never heard nothin’ ’bout no Polish Muslims,” he said, after a moment. “Don’t look like they servin’ Allah up there, not to me it don’t.”
On the bandstand, Uchalik got ready for his next number, “John Paul One, John Paul Two” (to the tune of the Beatles “Obla Dee, Obla Da”), dedicated to Hamtramck’s favorite pontiff. “For all you do, this song’s for you,” he said, and the crowd cheered, although some boos were mixed in. “Hey,” Uchalik said, “I know His Holiness can take a joke. One, two, three, four; ready, Yash?” “Ready, Stash …”
Helen Livingstone Bogle was perplexed. “Where are all the Polish people?” she asked.
Mrs. Bogle was sitting in her living room in Grosse Pointe, leafing through albums of family photographs and memorabilia. Her life story was there in the yellowing pictures—the family home on the lake, next to the Dodge mansion, where she had been born in 1921 (“I’m not the least bit self-conscious about my age”); photos from Grosse Pointe Country Day School and the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, where she had been polished and prepared for society; tintypes of maternal great-grandfather Travgoot Schmidt, who reputedly owned more real estate than any other man in Michigan, and of paternal grandfather William Livingstone (“Just the most elegant teddy bear of a man”), who founded Detroit’s Dime Savings Bank and once served as the president of the American Banking Association. There were also more contemporary mementos, including twenty-nine snapshots from “the nifty trip we took last year to Kenya.” Mrs. Bogle is a born archivist, and her chosen subject is the history of her family, which is, in its way, the social and commercial history of Detroit.
Reminders of the family’s prominence are not confined to Helen Bogle’s albums. Her grandfather, William “Sailor Bill” Livingstone, raised the money to dredge the channel of the Detroit River that now bears his name. The marble lighthouse on Belle Isle—the only one of its kind in America—is named for him as well.
Sailor Bill was a close friend of Henry Ford. “He loaned Henry two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to buy out his partners,” Helen Bogle said proudly, and showed me a book with a warm personal inscription from the auto magnate to the banking mogul. Next to it was a history of the Republican Party, authored by her protean ancestor.
On the wall in her living room there was a handsome oil portrait of a distinguished-looking man, her father, Seabourn Rome Livingstone, the former president of the Detroit stock exchange, as well as an oil painting of her parents’ yacht. The mantelpiece was crowded with pictures of various Livingstones and Schmidts.
Mrs. Bogle’s mother was a local golf champion, and her aunt was on the U.S. Curtis Cup team; it is from them that she inherited her athletic bearing and square-jawed, handsome looks. She paced about the house with an energetic stride, rushing downstairs for her childhood silver loving cup, upstairs for a photo of a family summer home (since sold to the state as a gubernatorial mansion), back downstairs to show an ornate dollhouse of her youth that she had found and reclaimed from her grandmother’s ballroom. The tour was accompanied by a stream-of-consciousness discourse on glorious times, now gone forever.
“Detroit was a small town in those days,” she said. “Everyone knew everyone else. I still can’t believe that Henry Ford [II] is gone. He was our link to the outside world, like a head of state. He bought my cousin’s house. As a girl I was driven to school in a chauffeured car. I was born with a platinum spoon in my mouth, and I was terribly closely held. But I was curious.”
Helen Bogle’s curiosity led to her take up a brief, highly unorthodox career as a photographer, and later to go to work as a fund-raiser for the Detroit Institute of Art. There, for the first time, she became the victim of discrimination. “My superior gave me a hard time because I had had a coming-out party,” she recalled. Harassment included being assigned a desk without a telephone. The young fund-raiser overcame that particular hurdle by calling the head of Michigan Bell, a family friend, and directing him to have a telephone installed forthwith.
During her years at the DIA, Detroit was still controlled by people Helen Livingstone Bogle knew as uncles—members of the auto aristocracy and their allies, the captains of business and industry. Now that the city has fallen into more callused hands, she rarely ventures into it.
“Very few Grosse Pointe people bother to go downtown nowadays unless it’s to the symphony or the museums,” she said. “The papers make it seem unsafe [Mrs. Bogle subscribes to one Detroit paper, as well as the New York Times and the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette]. Well, I suppose it is unsafe but there’s no need to publicize it on the front pages. Why not have a new society page for criminals? If you want to see who shot whom, just turn to Section D. The colored people—what do you call them nowadays, blacks?—well, I have known marvelous ones. But you cannot overlook the crime that is creeping out,” she said firmly.
When Helen Livingstone Bogle was growing up, there were no colored people in Grosse Pointe. “There used to be the point system here, of which I did not approve. We do have some black families now, though.” She pondered the change. “I should think they’ll be terribly lonely,” she said, not unkindly.
Notwithstanding the arrival of several black families, and a handful of Jews and Italians, Grosse Pointe seems to the outside observer to be pretty much what it has always been—a WASP bastion of privilege and wealth. Once restricted by explicit agreement, it remains off-limits to all but the richest and most socially confident, by virtue of custom and the astronomical cost of its stately homes. But Mrs. Bogle is anything but an outside observer, and to her experienced eye, deterioration is everywhere.
“Grosse Pointe is land poor,” she said. “My cousin is subdividing the family estate—ten acres. Things have changed so. I don’t have one family house that I can show you, except my grandmother’s. It’s this damn ADC [Aid to Dependent Children]—people don’t want to work anymore. You simply cannot get help. Where are all the Polish people?”
To demonstrate the fallen condition of Grosse Pointe, Mrs. Bogle donned a mink jacket and led me on a nostalgic tour of the area. Her first stop was her girlhood home, now part of a church, which is situated next to the Horace Dodge mansion. “Mrs. Dodge built the most beautiful house, which was a duplicate of the Petite Trianon. It had a seventeen-car garage with cinnamon-colored doors,” she recalled. “And her boat, the Dolphin, had a crew of seventy-five.”
Near the Dodge mansion she stopped at a nondescript building. “This is the Grosse Pointe Club,” she said. “It’s known as the Little Club.”
“Known to whom as the Little Club?” I asked.
Mrs. Bogle seemed nonplussed. “To whom? Why, to everyone,” she said, climbing out of her car for a closer inspection.
Inside, on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, the deserted clubhouse seemed fairly unimposing—thick green carpet on highly polished wood floors, flowered easy chairs, a closed veranda with a view of Lake St. Claire. But its charm lies not in its decor, but its membership.
“Who can belong to the Little Club?” I asked.
“Anyone who’s lucky enough,” she said. “We have around three hundred members—it’s the most exclusive club in Grosse Pointe.”
The Little Club’s initiation fee is $10,000, and monthly dues are $175. “That doesn’t seem exorbitant—unless you belong to a lot of clubs,” she observed. Most of the members are old-time Grosse Pointe people, although the club was, on that very day, in the process of accepting its first Jewish member, the director of the Detroit Institute of Art.
A quick cup of Protestant coffee and Mrs. Bogle was back behind the wheel, pointing out local landmarks. The Alger home (“General Russell Alger’s daughter was the first woman to go up in the Wright brothers’ flying machine”); the house of a childhood friend, actress Julie Harris; and the Merkle house, which once belonged to one of the town’s most prominent families but is now owned by two decorators. “Which is the way of it all,” Mrs. Bogle observed with weary sadness.
As she headed west toward Detroit, she occasionally pointed out one of the remaining mansions of her girlhood, which were scattered among newer, very substantial, ten- and twelve-room brick homes. “Some of these are originals,” she remarked. “And then you get the mix of these funny little … poops.”
Past Fox Creek, she turned down Alter Road, generally considered the border that divides the Pointe from Detroit. It was midday, but she immediately locked her doors. “Might as well take some precautions,” she said warily, although no one was in sight.
On the Grosse Point side of the street there were medium-sized brick homes; on the Detroit side, dilapidated frame houses, some of them boarded up. They were divided by a canal that runs the length of the street and by a chain link fence on its bank. Grosse Pointe wasn’t able to build its flood-control wall, but it has achieved a measure of physical separation from the black giant to the west.
Detroit’s proximity is a matter of grave concern to many Grosse Pointers. There had been a recent public controversy over the closing of a movie theater, just outside the city limits, that had attracted black patrons. “When your neighbors get funny, do you stay or move?” Mrs. Bogle asked rhetorically.
“What do you mean by ‘funny’?”
“Different from you,” she said in a silly-question tone of voice.
From Alter Road, Mrs. Bogle turned back to the east, heading away from the city, toward Provencal Road, “the last really nice street in Grosse Pointe,” across from the Detroit Country Club. She seemed to know every house on the short street. “That’s Kathy Ford’s place,” she said. “Henry bought it from my cousin. There’s the Williams home—you know, Soapy, the former governor. This one belongs to another cousin. And that is Bob Zeff’s house. He’s the only Jewish gentleman on the street. He was Kathy Ford’s divorce lawyer …”
Each of the homes on Provencal had a story. This one was the site of an adolescent party, that one the scene of an elegant affair, still another the residence of a local celebrity. “It is really a nifty street,” Helen Bogle pronounced.
“What makes a nifty street?” I asked.
“One that is established and doesn’t have too many surprises,” she said. By that standard, Grosse Pointe is a nifty city indeed.
On the way home, Mrs. Bogle shifted her perspective for a moment to the national scene. The presidential election had just ended with George Bush’s victory, of which she thoroughly approved.
“We had a party for George Bush at grandmother’s house a few years ago,” she recalled. “I like him very, very much.”
“That’s not surprising,” I said. “He’s the first president from your class since Kennedy.”
Helen Livingstone Bogle was not happy with the observation. “The Kennedys?” she said. “They tried to worm their way into everything. They were pushy. And I don’t know anybody of any race who is pushy and gets away with it.”
In the fall of 1986, the pushiest black man in Detroit, Coleman Young, gave an interview to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The occasion was Detroit’s No Crime Day, and the interview, which has become legendary, went like this:
CBC: … it’s so incomprehensible to us. I mean, you’ve had what, nine hundred and twenty-five people shot this summer?
Young: You know the figures better than I do.…
CBC: What would happen if you went door-to-door and started collecting all the guns?
Young: Well, then people wouldn’t have guns to shoot at each other. I have no problem with collecting all the guns if it is done like you do it in Canada. But I’ll be damned if I’ll let them collect guns in the city of Detroit while we’re surrounded by hostile suburbs and the whole rest of the state who have guns, where you have vigilantes, practicing Ku Klux Klan in the wilderness with automatic weapons. I am in favor of everyone disarming; I’m opposed to a unilateral disarming of the people of Detroit.”
When the mayor’s remarks were reported by the Detroit media, an angry cry went up from Grosse Pointe to Melvindale. Here was another example of Coleman’s paranoia and suburb-baiting. Statistics on the number of suburbanites (i.e., whites) shot by Detroiters (i.e., blacks) were brought forth; furious denunciations of the mayor appeared in the letters-to-the-editor columns of the Detroit papers; and even some of Young’s supporters admitted privately that this time he had exaggerated.
It was, indeed, hyperbole—the residents of Detroit are in no immediate danger from the dowagers of Grosse Pointe or the crew-cut patrons of Tom Coogan’s barbershop. But less than an hour up Highway I-96, in Livingston County, there are some good ol’ boys who wouldn’t mind teaching the mayor of Dee-troit what the business end of an M 16 looks like.
Livingston County is within commuting distance of the city, but few of its seventy thousand residents work there, or even visit. To them, the glitzy northwest suburbs and the ethnic enclaves to the east are almost as foreign as the black metropolis itself. Cross the line from Oakland County to Livingston County and you cross into a rural America right out of Faulkner.
One Saturday night, a street-smart reporter and I drove the forty miles north to check on a report that some of Detroit’s white police officers were attending the Ku Klux Klan cross burnings that are a regular weekend attraction in Gregory, a little town in the poorest part of the county. The reporter, who is white, covers the mean streets of Detroit with a fearless professionalism; but the eerie rural darkness was something else, threatening and oppressive. When we passed a sign, just outside Pinckney, advertising a survivalist camp, he instinctively clicked the locks on his car doors, just like Helen Bogle had on Alter Road.
Survivalist camps were in vogue in 1988. That summer some entrepreneurs opened a paint-ball facility in an abandoned factory complex in Detroit where suburbanites could don army fatigues and take part in simulated urban violence by shooting one another with paint guns. The gallery was originally called Little Beirut, which sparked an outraged protest from Detroit’s large Arab population. The name was changed, but the idea caught on, and hundreds of people came into the city each weekend to play Dirty Harry.
The owners of Little Beirut argued that their mock battlefield offered nothing more than good, dirty fun; and, in any event, it was in Detroit, where Coleman Young’s police force could keep an eye on it. But a survivalist camp in Pinckney was a different proposition. “They’ve got army trucks out there and a tank,” said a local law enforcement officer who met us in Gregory. “They say they shoot paint at each other, but you’d swear it was automatic weapons from the way it sounds.”
The officer sat at a table in the back corner of the Gregory Inn and ate the turkey-and-mashed-potato special. It was raining that night, and the place was full of hunters in dripping parkas. Tacked to the walls were posters advertising farm auctions and an ad for Carol’s Plucking Parlour and Slaughter House.
“I don’t know how the rain is going to affect the cross burnings,” said the lawman. “I don’t know if you can burn a cross in the rain or not.” He spoke with a neutral curiosity, as if he were discussing a possible rainout of a softball game.
“Do you know where they take place?” the reporter asked.
“Right down the road,” he said, gesturing with his head. “Cross burnings aren’t illegal up here. You don’t even need a permit. This is Klan country.”
The Klan and other white supremacist groups have been a prominent feature of Detroit’s political culture for decades. The city’s modern founding father, Henry Ford, was also America’s most outspoken Jew hater, a man whose picture hung on Adolf Hitler’s wall. And in the 1930s, Detroit’s best-known Catholic clergyman, Father Coughlin, was an open defender of Nazi racist doctrines.
Ironically, Coughlin began his public career when the KKK burned a cross on the lawn of his church, the Shrine of the Little Flower. In those days, there were said to be two hundred thousand Klan members in Michigan. A Klan offspring, the Black Legion, was a power in city politics, and the New Republic estimated that the group carried out some fifty murders between 1933 and 1936. The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, another nationally known bigot, was headquartered in Detroit. Ford, Coughlin, Smith and the Black Legion found fertile soil in the religious and racial xenophobia that Eastern European Catholics and southern whites brought with them to Detroit; they, in turn, created the climate for the race riot of 1943, the bloodiest of its time, in which thirty-four people died.
The modern repository for this legacy of racial violence is Livingston County, where there are hundreds of active Klan members and thousands of sympathetic fellow travelers. Robert Miles, who lives in Cochatca, near Howell, is the closest thing to a celebrity that the county can boast. Miles once served as a national grand dragon of the Klan, and he is a beloved figure in white supremacist circles. He advocates the establishment of an Aryan nation in a part of North America, which would presumably be created in the image of Livingston County.
The Klan is not the only hot organization up there. Not far from the Gregory Inn was a devil worship church, and townpeople claim to have sighted their breeders—young women who produce babies for the cult—shopping on Main Street. “I don’t go near them or their church,” said the lawman. “I hear they have animal sacrifices, and that’s against the law I suppose, but devil worship isn’t illegal around here, either.” Livingston County is nothing if not tolerant.
Local law enforcement personnel spend most of their time combing dirt roads for poachers, breaking up bar brawls and performing other mundane police tasks. There were only three homicides in the county in 1988—less than on a fast Saturday night in Detroit.
“The people out here, they moved here most of ’em because the KKK keeps the corruption out,” our host said. “Most of them are farmers, and they like the peace and quiet.”
The last time the Detroit reporter had been in Livingston County, he had attended a holiday party at the home of some acquaintances. “They had a big sign,” he recalled. “It said ‘Don’t shoot Jesse Jackson; we don’t need another national holiday.’ And these were liberals.”
“We don’t need another national holiday,” said the lawman, savoring the punchline. “Don’t shoot Jesse Jackson. Ha, ha.”
Jesse Jackson is not likely to venture into the Gregory Inn anytime soon. There are only three black families in the entire county, a statistic that is closely monitored. “Why would any blacks want to live up here?” the reporter asked, and the lawman shook his head. “Got me by the balls,” he said.
It was still raining heavily but our guide had promised a cross burning, so we headed down D-19 toward a small farmhouse with a traffic light attached to its roof. When we arrived, the light was red. “Hate to disappoint you but it looks like the burning got rained out after all,” said the lawman. “They use that light as a signal. When something’s going on, it’s green. And usually, when there’s a burning, there are hundreds of cars out here. Looks like you picked the wrong weekend.” There was genuine regret in the officer’s voice, like a Floridian apologizing for unseasonably cold weather in January. He was not a member of the Klan himself, but outsiders had shown an interest in his territory, and he was sorry not to be able to oblige.
Instead he took us for a ride to Hell. Howell is the county seat, but Hell, Michigan, is the spiritual capital of Livingston County. Presumably its founders intended the name as a joke, or as a tourist gimmick. A general store stocks postcards with captions such as “I’ve been to Hell” and “Why don’t you go to Hell?” But with hundreds of gun-toting Klansmen on the loose, and a Satanic cult just up the road, the jocular name seemed spookily appropriate.
“Doesn’t anyone object to this kind of stuff?” asked the reporter. “I mean, how about the people who live next door to the devil worship church?” In the city, people have been known to picket unwelcome neighborhood incinerators, but the ethic in Livingston County is live and let live. “People around here stay out of each other’s business,” said the lawman broadmindedly.
The rain began to let up and we cruised out of Hell, searching the back roads for an alternate-site cross burning. We passed through a quiet little town whose residents all come from Kentucky, drove by the devil worship church to look for signs of activity, and went by the survivalist camp, but we didn’t see a single burning cross that night.
Half an hour and many miles later, we were about to turn in when we met another patrol car coming down a dirt road in the opposite direction. The two stopped side by side, and the lone officer in the other car rolled down his window. He was glad to goof off for a few minutes and to engage in some friendly banter.
Hoping to salvage the evening, our host did a little fishing. “I hear rumors that your chief is in the Klan,” he said. “Know anything about that?”
“Yep, I heard that one too,” said the cop. “But I don’t know. I don’t like niggers much myself, but I ain’t in the Klan.”
As cops always do, the two men got to swapping combat stories. “Tell them about the time you busted that beer party,” the other man said, and our host laughed modestly.
“Hell, it was just a bunch of teenagers having a party,” he said, in the tone of the man who captured Dillinger. “Some dickhead and a bunch of his friends, including a guy in a wheelchair, were making a commotion. And their dawg was barking his head off.”
“He wanted to shoot that dawg,” said the other cop.
“Yeah, I sure did. Anyway, these kids started mouthing off, giving me a hard time, so I grabbed the guy that was giving the party and dragged him out in his front yard. In the rain. And I put that dickhead down on his knees and made him recite the Lord’s Prayer. Right there in the yard.” He laughed and his friend laughed. Police work, done right, has its satisfactions.
“Made him say the damn Lord’s Prayer,” said the lawman, shaking his head. “Right in the damn yard.”
“Yeah, but you still should have shot that damn dawg,” said the other. “That’s what you shoulda done.” The two cops raced their engines and thought about the lost opportunity. Then they put it in gear and headed down the dirt road in opposite directions, looking for poachers.
My friend the reporter and I drove back to Detroit. It was late, but the city was only forty minutes away, and we couldn’t wait to get back home.