“THANK GOD FOR MAYOR COLEMAN YOUNG”
In the fall of 1988, shortly after the Collins-Crockett campaign, a Detroit television station ran a profile on Mayor Coleman Young. Young’s relations with the local media have been stormy, but the documentary was highly complimentary, and the mayor seemed to be enjoying himself. The high point of the show came when he discussed his warm personal relations with former president Jimmy Carter.
In 1976, Coleman Young had, typically, done the unorthodox and endorsed the unknown Georgia governor early in his campaign. Once in office, Carter reciprocated with generous federal assistance. Young talked about the strange friendship between a white southerner and the militant mayor of Motown. “He is a very moral, very religious person,” said Young, and his eyes crinkled and shoulders shook in the mirthful gesture that usually precedes his one-liners. “Now, I’m not immoral, but I’ve never been accused of being too moral, either.”
It is one of the few accusations he has escaped during a public career that spans almost fifty years. Young has been called a communist, a radical and a crook, denounced as a heartless big-city boss and a ruthless dictator. In the suburbs he is considered a black racist; in the city, following his refusal to support Jesse Jackson’s presidential bid, some people labeled him an Uncle Tom. There is only one thing that everyone agrees on: Coleman Young, who was first elected mayor of Detroit in 1973, is a formidable and fascinating man.
Many Detroiters can never remember another mayor. Kids at the Whitney Young elementary school believe it is named after Whitney Houston and the mayor—a not-unlikely supposition in a city where Young’s name adorns everything. There is a Coleman A. Young community center on the east side and a seventy-five-acre Coleman A. Young civic center downtown on the Detroit River. Accomplished schoolchildren receive financial aid from the Coleman A. Young Scholarship Fund. The mayor’s picture hangs in virtually every city office, like the visage of some postliberation African leader—photographs of the young Coleman, handsome enough to have earned the nickname “the Black Clark Gable” in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood; or of the older, Big Daddy Coleman, light-skinned and gray-haired, with a Redd Foxx twinkle in his eye. Young’s name is inscribed on the stationery of city officials, and on their personal calling cards. And a few years ago he had it plastered in huge letters on the tower of the Detroit Zoo, which is located in suburban Royal Oak. This was vintage Coleman Young, an in-your-face gesture to the white suburbanites he loves to taunt and harass.
Political observers in Detroit sometimes call Young “the last of the great Irish political bosses.” There is, in fact, something Skeffingtonian in his audacious, often charming, sometimes ruthless domination of Detroit. But Young is more than a tribal politician; to many, he is a hero and a savior. Fittingly, there is a hagiographic flavor to the mayor’s biography, which is usually depicted as a series of challenges heroically overcome, stations of the cross successfully executed.
The story begins with Coleman the Gifted Student, denied a scholarship because of his race. Then there is Coleman the Officer in the Tuskegee Airmen, who went to a military stockade for opposing wartime Jim Crow regulations; Coleman the Labor Leader, tossed out of the UAW for radicalism; Coleman the Defiant, dragged before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lecturing his white inquisitors on the proper way to pronounce Negro; Coleman in Exile, unable to find work for almost a decade, scratching out a living “driving a little taxi, handling a little beef”; Coleman Redux, elected to the Michigan State Senate in the mid-sixties; and Coleman the Underdog, defeating the white establishment and the Negro E-lites to become the city’s first black mayor. And, finally, Coleman the Liberator, the man who dismantled the colonialist occupying forces and brought self-determination to the people of Detroit.
An anonymous poem, published as an ad in the playbill of a city program, put it this way:
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
There’s Only One Coleman Young
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
Thank God For Mayor Coleman Young
A Man With Integrity
A Man With Personality
He’s So Brave, He’s So Smart
Yet He’s A Man With A Great, Big Heart
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
Thank God For Mayor Coleman Young.
When I saw the poem, I wondered what Brooks Patterson would think of it, or the boys in Tom Coogan’s barbershop. The mayor’s enemies concede that he is smart; some admit that he is brave; and few would disagree that he has personality, at least the kind that appeals to his own people. But integrity is not a common adjective for Coleman Young in suburbia; nor do many see him as a man “With A Great, Big Heart.” Unlike other black mayors, such as L.A.’s Tom Bradley or Atlanta’s Andrew Young, he has never sought the approval of white people, never attempted to portray himself as a comfortable bridge between the races. Young is not the credit-to-his-race type of middle-class black whom whites find reassuring. You deal with Coleman Young on his terms, or no terms at all.
Young has been divorced twice and lives alone in the Manoogian mansion on the Detroit River. He travels the city in a midnight-blue limousine (“You want a Cadillac mayor, you buy him a Cadillac”) with two bodyguards and a police escort, earns $125,000 a year (the second-highest mayoral salary in the country), and dresses in quietly elegant, double-breasted silk suits. The trappings of wealth and power convey a message, but they don’t conceal, and are not meant to conceal, the fact that he is still a street man, a signifying mayor who uses the style and language of Black Bottom to delight his supporters and shock his opponents.
It took me about three days in Detroit to realize just what a powerful man he is. For one thing, whites—in and out of the city—couldn’t stop complaining about him. For another, none of the municipal officials I contacted for appointments would return my calls. “In this city, nobody will say anything without Coleman’s okay,” a reporter explained. “You better see him and let him know what you’re up to.”
I tried, but it wasn’t easy; the mayor’s press policy could not be described as open-door. You need a sponsor to get an appointment. Finally I found somebody who knew somebody who talked with Young’s spokesman, Bob Berg. After a few weeks of negotiation, I was eventually granted an audience.
I admired the technique. Young was letting me know that he wasn’t the mayor of some second-rate town; a meeting with him was a rare gift, something to be valued. This approach worked (it always does); I went to our first interview feeling like the Cowardly Lion on the way to Oz.
I arrived at the mayoral mansion at three o’clock on a sweltering August afternoon. An aide ushered me into the living room and told me to wait. I used the time to browse through a stack of books on the coffee table—The Holy Koran, Billyball, The Book of the Dead and Rare Breeds—A Guide to Horses—that testified to the eclectic tastes of a man who educated himself in the public library. The room was filled with memorabilia from his various trips—a Samuri sword and Japanese suit of armor, African sculpture—and a larger-than-life bust of His Honor. It is a bachelor’s living room, seldom used except for official occasions.
After half an hour or so, Bob Berg appeared and walked me upstairs to the mayor’s study, a cluttered and mercifully air-conditioned room. There, at half past three in the afternoon, I found the mayor of Detroit, dressed in blue pin-striped pajamas and a checkered bathrobe.
The television set in the room was tuned to CNN, and a deck of playing cards sat on the desk. Interviewers often mention the fact that the mayor conducts conversations while watching the tube and playing solitaire. The implication is that he is easily distracted, or perhaps a bit eccentric. But, as I came to discover, there is a white interpretation of Young’s actions, and a black one. Toward the end of our conversation that day, I asked him why he kept the television on.
“I don’t really watch this thing,” the mayor said, gesturing toward the set. “But I like to have it on in the background. See, I don’t want people listening in on my conversations.” This is not paranoia; several years ago, during an investigation into a municipal scandal, the FBI bugged the mayor’s private townhouse.
And what about the solitaire? I asked.
“I only play when I get bored,” said the mayor dryly, and his shoulders shook with silent laughter.
Humor is Coleman Young’s great solvent. He uses it to shock and deflate, charm and conciliate, or just to amuse himself. Young has the timing of a professional comedian, and the keen ear of an impersonator. Bilingual, he is able to switch back and forth effortlessly between perfectly crafted English and street talk. The latter is used primarily to disconcert what he calls “the black boogie wazzie” and other “phoney-ass people.” Since unknown white visitors are all suspect, he usually prefers to begin with profanity and jive, enabling him to size them up on his linguistic turf.
That afternoon, when I entered his office, the mayor was engrossed in some official papers. After a time he looked up and shook his head. “They want me to pass out free condoms, because of this AIDs thing,” he said, dropping the documents on the desk with an exasperated gesture. “Hell, why do I have to get involved in this? I neither condemn, nor do I condone, ah … fuckin’.” He paused and peered out of narrowed eyes for my reaction.
“Mr. Mayor,” said Berg, “this interview is on the record.”
“Oh,” said Young, in mock alarm. “Well, in that case, you better say that I, ah, condone fuckin’. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about me.”
I laughed. I had no idea if this was the appropriate response, but the remark struck me as funny. What the hell, I thought, at least I got one good quote.
Switching subjects but not tactics, the mayor mentioned a construction project that had run into some opposition because it would require uprooting part of a cemetery. “They got this Greek priest who’s leading the protests,” he said. “I found out that the motherfucker is from Warren. He doesn’t even have a got-damned church.” Again he turned his eyes on high beam and peered across the desk. I don’t know what he saw, but he was apparently satisfied; he conducted the rest of the interview in more or less conventional language.
Later, Berg, a white former newsman, explained that Young has an infallible way of gauging white attitudes toward blacks. The cursing is a part of the test, and people who flunk have very short audiences with His Honor.
Young’s conversational style is rambling and circuitous, but he always returns to the point, which is usually connected in some way with white racism and its crippling effect on blacks. Some of this is posturing; the mayor is far too sophisticated to believe that his city’s problems—especially its crime problem—can be attributed wholly to discrimination, past or present. His enemies say, with justice, that he uses suburb-bashing as a tool for deflecting criticism, much as southern segregationists a generation ago hollered “nigger” to make poor whites forget their own misery. Young’s attacks on the “hostile suburbs” are calculated to rally support, create an us-against-the-world atmosphere that he, as supreme commander of “us,” can use for political gain.
But there is no doubt that militance is more than a tactic; Young genuinely sees the world in racial terms. And when it comes to assessing guilt, he refuses to play the liberal game of dividing the blame and splitting the difference. “I view racism not as a two-way street,” he once told a conference on race relations. “I think racism is a system of oppression. I don’t think black folks are oppressive to anybody, so I don’t consider that blacks are capable of racism.”
Young also rejects the popular notion that the problems of black people—and of black Detroit—are a seamless web. “I’m not going to buy that vicious-cycle theory,” Young told the Detroit Free Press in 1987. “It starts with economic pressure, and the first economic pressure was slavery.… It reminds me of something Martin Luther King said. ‘How do you expect us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when we don’t even have boots?’ ” Improving on Dr. King, the mayor added a coda: “The motherfuckers stole our boots.”
The sense that Detroit has been fleeced and abandoned runs through Young’s conversation. So does resentment of whites who have left but continue to meddle in the city’s affairs. “I don’t know of any other city in the nation where there’s such a preoccupation in the suburbs for control,” he said. “The same people who left the city for racial reasons still want to control what they’ve left.”
Paradoxically, some blacks feel that Young himself has opened the door for white interference. Since taking office he has concentrated on rebuilding the downtown, and most of his grandiose projects have been financed and built by whites such as Henry Ford II and Max Fisher. The mayor is unapologetic about the strategy—which he views as necessary for creating jobs—or the tactic of marshaling suburban help. He is realistic in assessing the problem: “Ain’t no black people wielding any of the major power—economic power—in this city,” he said.
The inability to translate political control into economic self-sufficiency is perhaps Young’s greatest frustration. He goes through life keeping score: how many for us, how many for them. The dominant theme of his administration has been to get more black numbers on the scoreboard, but judged by that standard, he has been a disappointment. Only fourteen black-owned companies in Detroit earned more than $10 million in 1987, and six of them were auto dealerships. Even more revealing, of the twenty-five largest black-owned companies, just two were building firms whose combined income was $6.6 million. “The head of the Minority Contractors Association runs a soul food restaurant on Seven Mile Road,” a columnist for one of the daily papers said. “That tells you all you need to know, right there.”
Professional people have done better, although not as well as might be expected in a black-run city. A few weeks after our first meeting, the mayor attended the dedication of a downtown building. The architects involved stood on the podium. One was a towering black man, well over six-five. After the ceremony, he was introduced, by a mutual friend, to the mayor. “I noticed you up there,” Young said.
“It’s kind of hard to miss me,” said the architect. “I was the tallest one on the stage.”
“Yeah, and the only nigger, too,” snapped Young.
The mayor’s critics say that his tough racial rhetoric has kept whites from moving back to the city, but he dismisses the notion. “White people find it extremely hard to live in an environment they don’t control,” he observed archly.
This is very likely true, but the mayor has done little to allay the fears of his neighbors. A few years ago, Detroit constructed a monument to Joe Louis. The statue—a giant black fist—stands at the foot of Woodward Avenue, off the Lodge Expressway, where white commuters can’t miss it; it is not the sort of symbol calculated to calm jittery suburban nerves.
Nor is Coleman Young anybody’s idea of a law-and-order mayor. In his first inaugural address he made his famous remark about crooks hitting Eight Mile Road, but if they did, others have taken their place. And the fact that Young, who has an abiding distrust of cops, took that opportunity to include racist policemen in his list of personae non grata, did not endear him to the department.
Occasionally the mayor, reacting to public outcries, has assumed a sterner stance. After a spate of shootings in schools, he called for metal detectors at schoolhouse entrances. In the wake of persistent reports that Detroit cops were using drugs, he advocated random testing in the department. Both decisions violated his own principles of civil rights, and he adopted them with obvious reluctance.
Despite these sporadic get-tough efforts, however, Coleman Young clings resolutely to his old image as a bad-ass rebel. The mayor has an extensive collection of firearms, and he talks about guns with fond expertise. Within minutes of assuring me that Detroit’s violent image is a media exaggeration, he bragged about how dangerous the city is. “I always carried a gun when I knew it was necessary,” he said of the years before he became mayor. “In the old days, in the barbershop, there was a guy named Sol—Solomon—who used to make regular gun runs to Ohio. We’d order any damn gun we wanted.” Today, with two bodyguards, he no longer packs his own piece, but he leaves no doubt that he would know what to do with one.
Young’s machismo makes him a dubious role model for the city’s teenagers. Toward the end of the year, the mayor appeared before a group of two hundred high school students at a rally of Congressman George Crockett’s Youth Caucus. The kids, all but one of whom were black, listened avidly but with a certain bemusement as the mayor lectured them about their civic duties.
“I know I have the responsibility to close down the crack houses and scoop up the guns,” he said. But, he told them, they had to cooperate—by saying no to drugs, helping their friends to stay clean, and by calling the police to report crack dealers at school or in the neighborhood. The mayor used a mixture of mild profanity and occasional slang to make the point, and unlike most septuagenarians, he carried it off; Coleman Young’s street talk is still impeccable.
“Now,” he hollered to the kids, “are you tired of crime?”
“Yeah!” they chorused.
“Are you going to do something about it?”
“Yeah!” they answered.
“Are you prepared to point a finger and drop a dime on the sons of a bitch who’re dealing?” he thundered.
“No!” yelled most of the audience, with a spontaneity that startled the mayor. He narrowed his eyes, but his shoulders began to work, suppressing laughter. He made them answer again, getting a halfhearted “Yeah” the second time, but it was clear that everybody knew where everybody else stood.
Later, when I asked him about the rally, his eyes crinkled up and he began to laugh. “Did you really expect that the kids would agree to turn in pushers?” I wondered.
“Shit no; I know about the code of silence,” he said.
“Would you have turned in a drug dealer when you were their age?” I asked, and he looked at me as if I were softheaded.
“Me?” he said, in a tone of disbelief. “Hell no. But don’t forget, it was a different city then. Cops used to shoot black kids for fun. They’d tell you to run, and call themselves shooting over your head, and shoot you in the back. I learned when I was ten or eleven not to turn my back on a cop.” Although he could fire the chief of police with a phone call, there is still a lot of little Coleman in him, and the people of his city, the good guys and the bad guys, sense it.
One of the ways in which Coleman Young conveys his allegiance to his roots is through the use of profanity; when the mood is on him, he elevates cussing to a minor art form. Suburbanites and some prissy Detroiters complain about the mayor’s foul language, and church leaders often grumble that, as a role model, the mayor shouldn’t be saying “all kinds of bitches and motherfuckers.” Young, for his part, genuinely savors the shock value of his rough talk.
The newspapers in Detroit often go into reportorial contortions to convey the mayor’s language. Many interviews with him look as if they were written in Morse code, dots and dashes filling in for unprintable words. Local journalists take a certain pride in their inventiveness. During the mayor’s 1983 visit to Japan, for example, the Detroit Free Press began an article this way:
“When you speak Japanese,” the elderly interpreter explained, “there are many words that have different meanings by your tone of voice, your emphasis.”
“Oh, yes,” Mayor Young said. “We have words like that in English, too.”
He then pronounced a 12-letter compound expletive that he uses frequently, in various contexts …
During that same visit, Young was the dinner guest of the mayor of Toyota, Detroit’s sister city in Japan. After the meal, the Japanese host honored his colleague by donning a kimono and performing a warrior dance with a spear and fan. Then, in accordance with good manners, he asked Young to perform a dance of his own.
“I hate to disillusion you,” said Young, “but I can’t dance and I can’t sing. And I don’t like watermelon, either.”
Young is, indeed, tone-deaf, but he had changed his mind on the watermelon issue by the time, in December, he visited Detroit’s open-air Eastern Market. He was on one of his periodic forays around the city, and he stopped in to say hello to an Italian vegetable man, a crony from the old days.
After some vigorous hand-shaking, the vendor informed the mayor that a Chinese restaurant was about to open not far from his shop. Young, a connoisseur of Chinese cooking, nodded approvingly.
“What’s the owner’s name,” he asked.
“Don Pollack, something like that,” said the grocer.
“Pollack? What the hell kinda Chinaman is he?” demanded Mayor Young with mock outrage.
Trying to recoup, the Italian offered the mayor some poinsettias for his office.
“I don’t need no got-damned poin-settas,” said the mayor of Detroit. Pause. “How ’bout a watermelon?” The small crowd that had assembled laughed loudly. Coleman loves watermelon; we love watermelon; ergo …
On a state visit to Zimbabwe, Coleman Young approvingly called his host, President Robert Mugabe, “a mean sucker,” and compared his own problems with the bureaucracy of Detroit to local practice. “He doesn’t have a civil service, and he can shoot people if he wants to, I guess. I can’t do that,” Young said wistfully.
The mayor’s international style is not the product of ill-mannered buffoonery, any more than calling the governor of Michigan a “motherfucker” in a meeting or his periodic references to Ronald Reagan as “Old Pruneface” were slips on the tongue. Young’s language is calculated to get heads nodding on the corner, to serve as proof that Coleman hasn’t forgotten who he is and where he came from. A black businessman summed it up nicely. “I like Coleman because he’s him, and he ain’t gonna change him,” he said.
Young, the Cadillac mayor, is prickly about his prerogatives as leader of the black polis. During his first administration, he went to Washington to meet with the secretary of HUD. Instead, he was greeted by a black undersecretary. “I didn’t come here to see the house nigger,” he told the official. “Get me the Man.”
But the mayor is also capable of great charm and diplomacy when the occasion calls for it. This was in evidence one afternoon when, together with a representative of the governor’s office and the leaders of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, he unveiled a new joint marketing scheme for the tri-county area. The room at the Detroit Art Institute was crowded with businessmen in dark suits and a three-martini afterglow. On the dais, Young was the only black, a reminder of the true balance of power in the area.
The occasion was heralded as historic. “Never before has the tri-county region presented a common face to the nation and the world,” said the governor’s man. He explained that the idea was to launch a media blitz, showing the Detroit area as a center of world technology. This was to be accomplished through a series of glitzy promo films, set to a Motown sound track, which were screened for the assembled civic leaders.
Young sat watching the films with an amused look on his face, and from time to time he went into a private spasm of laughter. When he was introduced, his analysis of the program’s goals was a bit less high-minded than the state official’s.
“People from Japan, Mexico and, uh, Ohio been stealing us blind,” he said, getting the chuckle he wanted. “We got to stop fighting among ourselves and go out and steal from Ohio.” The assembled businessmen and officials, many of whom had been his targets in the past, laughed and applauded, happy to be on the mayor’s good side for once.
Following the meeting, Young was surrounded by a group of reporters. There is a keen sense of grievance in the Young administration against the local media. The mayor believes that they sensationalize and exaggerate crime in order to titillate suburbanites and increase advertising.
As far as I could tell, reporting in Detroit is actually unusually tame. The mayor’s tactic for keeping the media in check has been to holler racism at the first sign of criticism. The daily newspapers and television stations, run by white executives, are acutely conscious of the danger of having the charge stick.
After negative press coverage of several municipal scandals, Young’s administration commissioned three professors from Ohio University to do a media study. The report, a mostly boring review of the coverage of the scandals, concludes with the following admonition: “The media have to recognize that as long as they continue to operate in an unequal society where that inequality is based on race and do not constantly try to change that inequality by taking affirmative action, they are racist.” This is Mayor Young’s view, as well; visiting reporters are given a copy of the report as a warning that they, too, can be labeled racists.
No one is immune. The mayor publicly referred to Chauncey Bailey, a talented black journalist who writes for the Detroit News, as an Uncle Tom. Gary Baumgarten, a radio reporter who once worked for the black-owned Michigan Chronicle, was smeared as a racist for extending professional courtesy to a visiting Japanese television crew that produced an unflattering documentary on the city. In Baumgarten’s case, the mayor not only blasted his reporting, he gave him a push in the chest when the two met at a news conference.
The Young tactic of Mau-mauing the press has left reporters ambivalent toward him. His flamboyant style makes him a journalist’s dream, but it is extremely hard to get any real news out of him or his employees.
“Detroit is an ideal place to train for covering the Kremlin,” a Free Press reporter told me. “You can’t get any information in this city, even about things that are in the public domain. No one will talk to you without permission, and the mayor is the only one who can give permission.”
Unlike other cities, where politicians eagerly cultivate reporters, most of the journalists who cover the mayor have never had a personal conversation with him. A Free Press reporter, who has been on the city hall beat off and on for several years, refused to believe that I had been invited to Young’s home. “He actually served you a glass of lemonade?” the reporter asked with evident incredulity. “Christ, he’s never given me a glass of water.”
At that first meeting, I mentioned to the mayor that I was having trouble making appointments with city officials. He reacted with a disingenuous astonishment, apparently unable to believe that public servants would withhold information from the press. “Bob will take care of it,” he said, gesturing toward his press secretary.
Bob’s help proved unnecessary. Within an hour of our meeting I was flooded with phone calls from bureaucrats who suddenly wanted to talk. I have no idea how they found out I had met with their boss, but they knew. It was a lesson in the power of Coleman Young, and the antipress attitude he has fostered among his officials.
That attitude was on display at the Art Institute as the mayor laid into the assembled reporters. “I’m tired of you printing allegations and unfounded rumors,” he told them in a stern voice, and went on to accuse them of being tools of their editors.
Young’s vehemence put the journalists on the defensive. “Mr. Mayor,” protested one, “believe me, I rarely get any requests from my editors about what to write.”
Young looked at him contemptuously. “Hell yeah, rarely, that’s what I just said.”
“You mean we shouldn’t report when—” began a journalist, but the mayor cut him off. “Yeah, you should not report an unfounded allegation, goddamn it,” he snapped. Having got their attention, he then announced that he planned to sue the local press—in toto—for libel.
“You mean you’re going to sue us?” a young woman television correspondent asked plaintively, opening the way for a Colemanism. “Hell, no, I’m not gonna sue you,” he said. “I’m gonna sue the got-damn owners. Reporters don’t have any money.”
Despite the battering, the reporters stayed clustered around him. No one really protested, no one walked away in anger. Young’s indignation was finely calibrated. He hit just the right note, made his point, and kept his audience.
The mayor has the ability to captivate white people in face-to-face encounters, but he doesn’t use it promiscuously. It is a tool in his arsenal, like the cursing, the suburb-baiting and the occasional outbursts of his incendiary temper. He is capable of cordial, even close relations with trusted whites, especially old comrades from the radical union days, and he has been able to build strong working relationships with a number of wealthy businessmen. But these are always based on mutual interest, never on sentiment. Coleman Young is the black mayor of a black city, a fact never far from his consciousness.
As Arthur Johnson observed, in no other place in the country have blacks succeeded in gathering so much political power into their own hands; specifically, the hands of the mayor. After four terms, he has cast the city government in his own image. Five of the nine members of the City Council are black. So were the chief of police, the fire chief, all four police commissioners, and the heads of most city departments (and, although Young does not appoint them, both congressmen, the superintendent of schools and a majority of the city’s judges). The few whites on the mayor’s personal staff were in positions that required liaison with the outside world. Spokesman Bob Berg’s job was to maintain lines of communication with the mostly white press corps. Young’s chief federal lobbyist, Dorothy Brody, was recruited to deal with the Washington establishment. June Roselle, a holdover from the Gribbs administration, was the mayor’s main fund-raiser. Roselle, Berg, Brody and a handful of others were accepted because they were Young’s people, but they exercised no independent power of their own.
In city departments, where they are a minority, whites often feel like outsiders. One senior official told me that she received bomb threats from colleagues because she was not part of the “black political mafia.” Others complained about reverse racism, although not on the part of the mayor himself. But most people simply take the black complexion of the administration for granted. After all, Coleman Young is not exactly the first big-city mayor to provide patronage and power to his own supporters.
But Young has done more than broaden access to the pork barrel. Under him, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there—showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy and the cult of personality. Detroit has even developed a quasi-official ideology that regards the pre–Young era as a time of white colonialism, ended by the 1967 insurrection and its aftermath. An official city publication describes the police department as having been “a hostile white army, entrusted by white authorities with the job of keeping nonwhites penned up in ghettoes.”
Not surprisingly, some of Coleman Young’s closest associates identify readily with Africa and the Third World. One of them, Ron Hewitt, the city’s planning director, is a disciple of Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman.
“Race is the element that makes Detroit completely different from other American cities,” Hewitt told me. “We are seen as not just black, but aggressive and assertive. I told the mayor that the chief thing that enrages the suburbs is that he has the temerity to actually believe that he is the mayor. People in the suburbs want us to fail. The situation here is very similar to postcolonial situations in the Third World. People always say, ‘The Africans can’t govern themselves,’ and that’s what they say about us, too.”
Hewitt, no less than Young himself, regards the relationship with the surrounding white communities as an ongoing war of liberation. “If you feel at the end of every day that you have struggled, that’s liberating. That’s probably the extent of the black man’s liberation in America. Now, we may lose the struggle with the suburbs, but we will make it interesting. They better bring their lunch.”
Hewitt is the planner for America’s sixth largest city, once the symbol of the country’s industrial power. But the old myths of the Arsenal of Democracy mean little to him. “As a people we have more soul, we are more spiritual than others,” he said. “Our technology will be tempered by that soul. If white folks could leave us alone and give us the resources, we could solve our own problems.”
Outsiders, especially white outsiders, tend to view this sort of talk with skepticism; Detroit is the place where blacks have been left on their own to sink or swim—and, by every conventional measure of prosperity, security and growth, they are sinking. Even senior officials and politicians cannot isolate themselves from the morass of poverty and violence—several years ago, Ron Hewitt’s own son was shot to death in a street incident.
But most black Detroiters do not measure their lives, or their city, by the yardsticks of the American middle class. Young may not have provided them with the safest streets or most efficient services; nor has he been able to raise their standard of living. But he has given his constituents something even more valuable: a feeling of empowerment and personal worth. Detroit is one of the few places in the country where blacks can live in a sympathetic, black-oriented milieu.
“Detroit is an environment where you can forget about being black,” said Cassandra Smith-Gray, who heads the city’s welfare department. “I don’t think about being black, because everybody is. This is a very different place from the South Bronx, L.A. or Jackson, Mississippi. Here, our government is black. This is not the real world. Some of my anger has been knocked out, but it comes back if I cross Eight Mile Road.”
Detroit’s politics and government are now so monochromatic that it is hard to recall that in the not too distant past, America’s sixth largest city was governed by men with names like Cobo, Miriani and Cavanaugh. Albert Cobo has since been memorialized in a downtown convention center. Louis B. Miriani, who ended his career in prison, is largely unsung. But Jerome Cavanaugh, once the wunderkind of American municipal politics, is still something of a presence in Detroit. Although the former mayor died more than a decade ago, he lives on in the memory of a coterie of loyalists, who recall his administration as the Motor City Camelot.
Once a month the Cavanaugh Clan gathers at the Irish Saloon on Trumbull Avenue, near Tiger Stadium. There, in the back room, they meet to recall old times, plot new strategies and keep the Cavanaugh machine together.
Of course they have no hope of regaining control of the city; demographics and the far more muscular Young machine have made that an impossibility. Unlike New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, white candidates are no longer taken seriously in Detroit. Cavanaugh’s forces have retreated to the suburbs, where they have parlayed experience, solidarity and residual popularity into county office.
Many of them were there at the Irish Saloon one afternoon in late October: Cliff Sullivan, Cavanaugh’s city assessor; Bobby Holmes of the Teamsters Union; Woody Youngblood, registrar of deeds in Wayne County; and a triumvirate of Irish judges—Tom Gallagher, Joe A. Sullivan and Joe B. Sullivan (presumably Cavanaugh left office before his machine could find a Joe C.). They were, for the most part, hale-looking men in late middle age, dressed in suburban leisurewear and sporting exemplary dentures.
At a table near the corner sat Bart Donlan, a spruce, handsome man of seventy-eight with glistening eyes and a dry sense of humor. Donlan, once the secretary of the Board of Health and district chairman of the Democratic Party, now lives in Warren, and he is one of the driving forces behind the monthly conclaves. When I asked if the supporters of any other former mayor, such as Louis Miriani, still held similar gatherings, he shook his head. “Miriani had the misfortune of going to jail,” he explained philosophically.
In the old days the Cavanaugh machine was known as the Irish Mafia, although a number of its members were Jewish. Detroit has never had a dominant Irish population like those of some eastern cities, but, according to Donlan, people like to vote for the Irish. “When the Poles run out of Polish candidates to vote for, they always pick an Irishman,” he said.
People stopped by Donlan’s table to pay respects and josh with the old man, whom one described as “Jerry Cavanaugh’s Dutch uncle.” When Tyrus (named for Ty Cobb) Place, the group’s lone Republican, came over to say hello, Donlan regarded his Bush for President button with amused contempt. “They named a whole league after your candidate,” he said with a disarming smile.
From time to time Donlan scanned the crowded room, counting the present and noting the absent. Wayne County executive Ed MacNamara wasn’t there that day, nor was Patty Knox, the state liquor commissioner, or Jim Killeen, the county clerk. Their absence was more than compensated for, however, by the presence of three of Cavanaugh’s eight children.
Mark Cavanaugh, a studious-looking young man, was running for a seat on the court of appeals in Oakland County, and his campaign was very much on the agenda. The meeting opened with Donlan’s wife announcing a hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser for him at a suburban eatery. Mark, who needed no introduction, stood and waved.
More announcements followed. Ex-state senator Eddie Robinson reminded the group of the Monsignor Kern golf outing. Then Cliff Sullivan introduced a guest, a black police inspector. There were a few elderly black men in the room, obligatory officeholders from the time when tokenism was a liberal necessity, but the inspector clearly wasn’t one of the old guard; Coleman Young speaks well of Cavanaugh, but his appointees don’t come from the Irish Mafia. The inspector was a representative of the new order, a reminder that outside the congenial atmosphere of the Irish Saloon, Detroit is now in the hands of blacks. The officer stood up and took a bow, and there was an awkward silence until a lilting voice called out, “It’s nice to have a fine Irishman like yourself on the force,” and the tension in the room dissolved into laughter.
The old-time Cavanaugh people are nothing if not professionals, and they regard Coleman Young with a dispassionate admiration uncommon among white Detroiters. “Sure he cries racism all the time,” said a lawyer. “But that’s just politics. The man is brilliant.”
The only amateurs present that day were Cavanaugh sons Chris and J.C., who were there to show solidarity with brother Mark’s campaign. The Cavanaughs do not look like brothers; it’s as if each was sired by a different aspect of their father’s complex personality. Chris, in his late twenties, is a Notre Dame graduate who said he was “just basically taking it easy,” although he hoped to go into sales. He is the nostalgic Cavanaugh, the custodian of his father’s legacy, and he was far from complimentary about the new regime.
“We have a silent majority in Detroit,” he said. “White people are neglected. They don’t want to leave. There are so many people who think that the city is still what it was—Coleman Young to them is like a blackout.”
Chris and his twenty-five-year-old brother J.C., a Wayne State student, share a house on Detroit’s far east side, in one of the city’s few remaining middle-class enclaves. J.C. is reserved and handsome, the inheritor of his father’s sex appeal. He listened to his older brother, but said nothing.
“I’d love to get involved in Detroit politics,” said Chris, “but I don’t think it’s realistic. I’d love to see the old-time politics come back, but the Kennedys and the Cavanaughs are gone. In this city, old neighborhoods are being destroyed, old schools are closing down. The Cavanaugh years were good, happy times.”
Mark joined the conversation. He has his father’s political ambitions, along with a strong measure of caution. He is also a realist. “Those were Camelot days,” he said. “But the riot took the steam out of that.”
The Cavanaugh boys lost their father when they were young; they speak about him warmly, but with a certain detachment. A good deal of what they know about him seems to come from history books or the recollections of former cronies.
“In 1963, dad marched with Martin Luther King,” Chris said. J.C. nodded; he had heard that, too.
“If dad were alive today, Detroit would break his heart,” said Chris. “I think that Coleman Young is awfully intimidating.”
“Well, there’s a certain amount of balancing the scales that had to be done,” Mark said judiciously. “Coleman has gone to the school of hard knocks, like us. The Irish were the niggers of the world in the early 1900s.” He thought about what he had said and began to explain it, when his younger brother broke in.
“Put niggers in quotes,” Chris instructed. “And put in that he tried to cover up afterwards.” He laughed, a full-throated laugh that had once belonged to a young liberal by the name of Jerome P. Cavanaugh.
Nobody bothers to put the word nigger in quotes at the City Residence Club. Whites in Detroit have learned to be circumspect in their language, but at the Residence Club, the storefront headquarters of Coleman Young’s political machine, there are no whites, and nigger is a term of endearment.
The few white visitors to the clubhouse are quickly reminded of the realities of Coleman Young’s Detroit. When I stopped by, accompanied by a member, we were greeted at the door by Chuck Bailey, a large man in a leather cap. “If you’re with her you must be all right,” he said, gesturing toward my host. “But down in Georgia, my daddy used to say that it ain’t enough for a white man to be all right. You got to be all all right.” He laughed, but there was a hard edge to it; at the City Residence Club, the white man’s burden is the burden of proof.
It was a few days before the presidential election of 1988, and the Residence Club was serving as a headquarters for the Dukakis campaign in Detroit. Dukakis’s people were counting on the city to offset the expected Bush vote in the once Democratic, now basically Republican, suburbs. Handbills were stacked on tables and posters of the narrow-eyed Duke hung over the door and on the walls. In the front room, wholesome-looking young men in white shirts and dark ties, political apprentices, milled around stuffing envelopes and talking into telephones. An older man supervised the activity. When the phones rang, they answered “Dukakis headquarters,” but the salutation somehow lacked conviction. As a Democrat, Dukakis would carry the city but, as elsewhere in black America, he was seen as not much more than the lesser of two evils.
Anybody can volunteer to work in the outer office of the Residence Club, but not everyone can pass into the inner sanctum, where the serious politicians gather. The room is dominated by a long wooden table, a television set and, in the corner, a card table. That night, several civic leaders were engaged in a card-slapping game of bridge. Others lounged around talking politics. A sense of urgency about the upcoming election was notably absent.
A retired, dapper-looking man named Mr. Holly sat at the long table and regarded me with interest. “How ya doin’?” he said, meaning, Who are you and what do you want?
“I’m a writer from Israel,” I said. “Maybe I’ll become an honorary out-of-town member. How do I sign up?”
The old man laughed. “All you gotta do is pay your dues,” he said, and then paused, considering. “Hell, forget that. Don’t nobody pay no dues around here anyway.”
But there are all sorts of dues in Detroit politics, and the most important kind don’t involve money. The members of the Residence Club are old friends and political allies of the mayor, men and women who remember the city before it was delivered into the hands of its black citizens. In the campaign of 1969, when a black candidate, Richard Austin, narrowly lost to a white, Roman Gribbs, they learned the value of organization. The Residence Club, for all its informal camaraderie, has been organizing ever since.
Its techniques are the tried-and-true commonplaces of urban politics—petition drives, telephone solicitation, door-to-door campaigning, and a little old-fashioned problem solving for the deserving citizen. Boss Tweed might not have understood the dialect, but he would have spoken their language.
The mayor’s political power, however, does not rest entirely on the Residence Club machine. Young, who occasionally throws himself a fund-raiser, had a campaign war chest said to be in excess of four million dollars. “The mayor was raised during the Depression,” Bob Berg told me. “He doesn’t really need the money, but it makes him feel better having it around.”
The issue of the mayor’s finances intrigues the local press and political establishment. His administration has not been scandal-free—in the early 1980s, six people, including a top city official, were convicted of bribery, conspiracy and fraud in a multi-million-dollar sludge-removal scam known as the Vista case—but, although the FBI investigated him, there never has been any proof that Young was involved.
Despite the absence of evidence, Young’s enemies believe that he must be a crook. The chief proponent of this theory is state senator Gil DeNello, who grew up in an Italian neighborhood called Cagalube, which, he says proudly, means “where the fox shits.”
“My biggest criticism of Coleman Young is that he is using his political office, that the public has entrusted him with, for his own personal gain. Enriching himself in favors and money,” DeNello said. “Do you think Coleman is above taking money under the table? They tapped his phone. The mere fact that the mayor of this town was involved in this shit [the Vista scandal]—there’s a saying that the appearance of impropriety is worse than actuality.… He’s got four million dollars and his people are starving. The government won’t tackle him because he’s black and they’re afraid of another riot. But the man belongs in jail. He’s let his own people down.”
At the Residence Club, DeNello’s unsubstantiated charges elicited little more than a yawn. Besides, nobody there seemed to think that the mayor had let them down. A businessman spoke for everybody. “I’ll tell you the truth. I ain’t doin’ good, I’m doing got-damned good,” he said. “Mind now, I got along before. I ain’t never bought no shoes better than the other ones.”
Young’s critics have compared the mayor to another master of municipal machine politics, Richard C. Daley. Young himself has a high regard for the methods of the late Chicago mayor, and there are, indeed, some similarities of technique. Young, like Daley, has been in office a long time; and if, after sixteen years, some of his appointees want to help their boss by turning out for a political rally or fund-raiser, this seems to him to be nothing more than commendable loyalty.
In the summer of 1988, Young raised a proposal for casino gambling in Detroit. The proposal was opposed by what he calls the ABC (Anybody But Coleman) coalition, good government types and the churches, some of which objected on moral grounds, others because they feared it might cut into their bingo business. The antigambling forces staged a rally downtown early one Saturday morning, but their speakers were drowned out by hundreds of aroused procasino people who happened to drift by with posters, leaflets and bullhorns. Many also happened to be employed by the city of Detroit. The proposal failed to overcome the moral reservations of Detroiters, but it was an impressive show of force by the mayor, all the same.
At about the same time, Young suffered a far more serious defeat. In the Michigan primary he supported Michael Dukakis, largely because he hates Jesse Jackson. This animosity goes back to Young’s first campaign, in 1973, when, his supporters claim, Jackson demanded payment for endorsing him. The mayor, who is proud of his own executive abilities, was also contemptuous of the preacher-politician’s rhetorical flourishes. “The only thing Jesse ever ran was his mouth,” he once said.
Despite the mayor’s opposition, Jackson carried Detroit overwhelmingly; even many of Young’s own loyalists voted for him. Ironically, people went for Jackson for much the same reason they supported the mayor—because they saw him as a defiant black man whose conventional credentials for office were beside the point.
These setbacks were not taken seriously at the Residence Club, however. “Coleman ain’t the best candidate,” a member told me happily. “He’s the only candidate.”
That fall, a year before the next mayoral campaign, Young was not worried about reelection. According to his spokesman, Bob Berg, his main concern was helping Michael Dukakis beat George Bush. “We can’t afford another four years of Reaganism,” Berg said, echoing his boss.
Under “Old Pruneface,” Detroit, like other major cities, experienced lean times. The local mythology is that the city was singled out for special punishment, but this doesn’t seem to be true. Young’s own staff told me that under Reagan, Detroit got more federal money than any big city except New York. The problem was more structural than personal: Reagan’s policy was to steer federal funds to state governments for disbursal to the cities, rather than to give them it directly, as Carter had.
In any event, Young was willing to help the Democrats. In the weeks before the election he stumped the city, turning up at events he would have normally skipped, sharing the dais with a number of visiting politicos. Still, it didn’t seem like his heart was in it; political pros said he was sulking over Jackson’s primary victory.
One morning about ten days before election day, Young joined another of Jackson’s critics, Coretta Scott King, at a get-out-the-vote rally at the Veteran’s Memorial Building. Nominally it was a nonpartisan affair, but since there are more Eskimos than Republicans in Detroit, no one had any doubt who its beneficiary would be.
Like all public meetings, this one began with gospel singing, “One in the Father, One in the Son.” Then Kim Weston sang black America’s national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This, too, is standard Detroit practice. On occasions when the presence of white dignitaries makes “The Star-Spangled Banner” necessary, the master of ceremonies invariably follows it by saying, “Now we will sing our anthem,” and “Lift Every Voice” is performed.
An invocation followed. Mrs. King, for whom praying comes naturally, lowered her eyes reverently. Coleman Young, for whom it evidently does not, took the occasion to glance through some papers.
Young’s lack of piety is impressive, especially for a politician in such a devout city. He was raised a Catholic, although he left the church early; typically, his memories of it revolve around its bias against blacks in general and him in particular. When he graduated from St. Mary’s elementary school, Young was turned down for scholarships by three Catholic high schools, despite his A average. A teacher told him that he had only been considered because they thought he was Asian; blacks were ineligible.
Almost sixty years later that memory still rankles. A few days earlier, the Archdiocese of Detroit announced that it was closing 43 of the 114 churches in the city—the largest shutdown in the history of the American church. Young, who snarls at shopkeepers who move their stores to the suburbs, took the news with an uncharacteristic public shrug. Privately he made it clear that he was not sorry to see the churches close. “What Cardinal Shaka did is only good sense,” he told me. “Catholics are mostly white, and they’ve left the city. And a lot of the churches that are still here have erected racial barriers. Why should the church subsidize prejudice?”
There was more than just the memory of a youthful insult behind this attitude. The ethnic whites who have remained in the city—mostly elderly, mostly Catholic—are a major faction in the ABC vote. The church itself has never been an active enemy of the mayor; but, funded and led independently, it is one of the few institutions he doesn’t dominate.
The evangelical flavor of the get-out-the-vote meeting continued through the introductory remarks. The mayor of Highland Park began her speech with a ritual, “Giving praise unto God who is the head of my life,” in much the same way that Iranian mullahs praise Allah before every public utterance.
In the back of the room, I spotted a group I had come to think of as “The Mayor’s Men.” They are the new political class of Detroit, ubiquitous young black men in power suits and gleaming glasses who congregate whenever Young is present. They stood in small clusters and exchanged the coin of municipal government—gossip about contracts, appointments, and what the mayor had said to them just the other day. From time to time they switched groups, like partners in a folk dance.
Not far away, all alone, stood Dick “Night Train” Lane, the legendary former defensive back of the Detroit Lions, and a crony of Young. Lane, who runs the Police Athletic Program, was dressed out of another era—purple suit draped over his now dining-car-sized frame, and tan shoes. He is an anachronism in an administration dominated by smooth, polished young men, but it was hard to imagine the mayor, smoother and more polished than any of them, sipping late-night brandies in the Manoogian mansion with the woolworsted yuppies.
When the time came, Coleman Young offered the crowd a few platitudes about good citizenship and then introduced Coretta King. They embraced, making an odd couple. Mrs. King is the living symbol of the civil rights movement, the custodian of her husband’s legend, with all the moral fervor and idealism it implies. Young, who came out of the labor movement and the smoke-filled rooms of big-city politics, is closer in temperament, if not in ideology, to Boss Curly than to any southern preacher.
Mrs. King made a fine speech about the need for black people to elect candidates who support their interests. As she talked, Young grew visibly restless. He glanced more often at his official papers and looked around the room. The men in the suits tried to catch his eye. Occasionally he acknowledged them with a nod or a gesture. When the speech ended, the mayor seemed relieved. He gave Mrs. King an avuncular kiss on the cheek, gathered up his papers and headed back to his office, where there was real work to do. The men climbed into their city cars and followed.
They were there again, a day or two later, at a political breakfast at the Lomax church. The mayor’s men were virtually indistinguishable from the hundred or so ministers in attendance, who were also dressed like investment bankers. The bureaucrats and divines sat at long tables as white-clad members of the ladies’ auxilliary passed among them with plates of bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits. Occasionally the churchwomen collided with political aspirants who walked through the crowd passing out pamphlets and campaign buttons like waiters in a dim sum restaurant.
Coleman Young entered, accompanied by Congressman Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and took his place at the head table. The ministers stood at respectful attention and applauded, and a line immediately formed a few feet from the dais. One by one they approached the mayor for brief whispered conversations, each of which ended in a whooping laugh. Men of God on Sunday, during the week they were Young’s precinct captains, and he treated them each to a one-liner or anecdote they could dine out on in the days ahead.
Congressman Fauntroy rose to introduce the mayor. “People love Coleman Young,” he told them, “because he always says the appropriate word—the appropriate word.” A laugh went up; everybody knew what word Fauntroy was talking about. “And he says it the way you like to say it,” Fauntroy added, getting an even bigger laugh.
Young’s remarks were, once again, brief and dry. He is a good speaker, but not an inspired one. Probably twenty men in the room were better orators. Unlike Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, or Fauntroy himself, all of whom are ordained ministers, Young lacks the intense, gospel-inspired cadences of the church. When he attacked the Reagan administration and called the members of its civil rights commission “Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs,” they hollered “Yessir!” and “That’s right!” but these were courtesy calls. Fauntroy’s compliment notwithstanding, the mayor is appreciated more for what he says than how he says it.
The congressman’s speech was a different story. He is the pastor of one of the largest black churches in Washington, and he was in his element, quoting from the Bible, praising the preachers for their political power (“Black ministers are the umpires, and you can call this one for the Democrats”) and carrying them away with a rolling litany of past heroes. “Somebody has to vote this year for Martin Luther King,” he intoned. “Somebody has to vote for Medgar Evers. Somebody has to vote for Malcolm; somebody has to vote for Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.” As he called off the names, the ministers hollered “Vote, vote!” and the church basement filled with emotional energy. Fauntroy was doing more than whipping up the troops; he was providing his fellow clergymen with a model sermon for the following Sunday morning.
Suddenly, without warning, the congressman began to sing “The Greatest Love of All.” He sang in a high, professional voice, tore off his jacket to cheers, and swung the microphone by its cord like a nightclub crooner. The ministers stood and sang along with him, and only the tone-deaf mayor remained seated, his shoulders shaking with appreciative laughter.
I was sitting next to Jim Holley, who had greeted me with a collegial “Good morning, Reverend,” when I came in. He cheered and clapped with the others, but I knew he wasn’t applauding for the mayor. The two men have clashed often, particularly over Holley’s support of Jesse Jackson. Young calls Holley “an Oreo” and the feeling is mutual.
As I watched the mayor leave, surrounded by his entourage, I recalled what Holley had told me about him a few weeks before. We had been sitting in his study when Young’s name came up, and suddenly the black rabbi sounded like Brooks Patterson.
“We asked for control of this city,” he said. “Well, now we’re in control and everything is out of control. We don’t build anything, not even a grocery store. The mayor has been in office fifteen years and only two blacks own anything downtown. Why? Because we don’t hold Coleman accountable. What we have is a group of blacks running a black plantation.”
I mentioned to Holley that the mayor seemed pretty popular for a plantation master.
“Maybe he’s still popular, but there were slaves who loved their owners, too,” he said. “If Coleman was white, he would have been gone a long time ago, and that’s a fact. But black politicians think they can do any damn thing to black people and get away with it. White people aren’t our problem. They don’t control our schools. We got to stop blaming white people for everything.
“I’ll tell you something else,” he continued. “If Coleman gets in trouble, he’ll get a white lawyer. A slave is a slave, whether he’s in the house or the field. We call them rent-a-Toms today. Their job is to keep the black folks calm and quiet. Coleman feeds us emotions and gives the bread to the white folks. And you can’t ride to freedom in Pharaoh’s chariot. Maybe once he was good for this city, but it’s time for him to move on—it’s Joshua time.”
Holley’s was a minority opinion among black Detroiters that fall. Despite the city’s manifest difficulties, he was still Big Daddy, leader of the revolution, first president of the republic, field marshal of the forces of retribution. If he had not solved all their problems, he had at least provided the people of Detroit some of the nation’s best political theater. And, more important, he had given them a sense of control over some portion of their own lives. For this they forgave him his trespasses, as he condemned their trespassers.
Surrounded by reverent loyal appointees, sustained by a campaign fund that made a run at his job impractical at best, checked-and-balanced by a city council grown accustomed to his authoritarian rule, supported by a white industrial establishment indebted to him for keeping the lid on, covered by a press frequently charmed and bludgeoned into averting its gaze, in the fall of 1988, Coleman Young was perhaps the most powerful and independent black politician in the United States.
And yet, a year before the next election, even some of Young’s strongest supporters were beginning to wonder how long he could go on. He was seventy years old and, some said, not in the best of health. Worse, it was whispered that the old lion was going soft. He had taken his casino gambling defeat almost philosophically, had gone out of his way to patch things up with Jesse Jackson; and it had been months since his last tirade against the hostile suburbs.
More and more he was given to reflection. One day, during a drive through the city in the mayoral limo, he unexpectedly mentioned the fact that Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson exchange kisses in public.
“You know something?” he said. “I never even kissed my father when I was a kid. It was that macho thing we had. I don’t think I hugged him more than a couple of times. It’s only in the last few years that I feel comfortable embracing another man, and I’m past seventy.” Young looked into the distance, and suddenly he seemed strangely vulnerable. He wondered aloud how long he could continue. Sometimes, he said, he dreams of a quiet old age, far removed from his battles with the suburbs and the challenges of his job. He talked of the joys of peace and solitude, a well-earned rest. It was a moving, convincing meditation, and his spokesman, Bob Berg, listened to it with growing concern.
“So, am I ready to bow out gracefully?” Coleman Young asked in what seemed to be a rhetorical tone. “Am I ready?” Suddenly the mayor of Detroit crinkled his eyes and his shoulders began to work up and down. “Hell no, I ain’t ready,” he said. “They’ll have to carry me out on my fucking shield.”