THE FAT LADY SINGS
Early in 1989, election year, Coleman Young got some unexpected news—he was a father.
The stork arrived in the form of a paternity suit filed by a thirty-five-year-old former city employee, Annivory Calvert. Calvert, now living in California, charged that Young was the father of her six-year-old son, Joel. Through her lawyers she demanded that the mayor acknowledge the boy and pay child support.
At first, the heretofore childless seventy-one-year-old Young seemed nonplussed. “If it weren’t so serious, it would be flattering or funny,” he told the press, and then refused further comment. But it was too good a story to go away. The papers had a field day with the news that Big Daddy had become a dad. Political opponent Tom Barrow tut-tutted that the mayor was a poor role model for the city’s youth. Women’s groups demanded that Young meet his obligations. Here and there, church leaders raised their voices in moral indignation.
Worse than the indignation were the jokes; Young became the butt of disrespectful humor. In an act of lesse majeste, a local disc jockey changed the words of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from “Earth control to Major Tom” to “Birth control to Mayor Young,” and played it on the radio. For the first time in years, people were laughing at him, and Young didn’t like it at all.
The election was eight months away and the mayor had no intention of running with a paternity suit on his back. When a blood test revealed that the odds were 270 billion to one that he was, indeed, the father of Annivory Calvert’s son, Young instructed his lawyer to work out a deal.
It proved expensive—close to $1,000 a month in child support and the establishment of a $150,000 trust fund—but it was money well spent. One of the mayor’s reelection slogans was “Do the Right Thing,” and he could hardly face the electorate, many of whom were, themselves, victims of indifferent fathers, as a coldhearted skinflint.
I was in Israel when the scandal broke, and when I returned, a month or so before the November election, I asked a reporter if it had affected the mayor’s chances. “It was bad for a while,” he said. “Some church people were offended. But it’s blown over. The truth is, a lot of folks are proud of the old man. Now there’s an heir to the crown.”
There were also pretenders to the throne that year. Since Young first came to power, in 1973, by narrowly defeating White Hope candidate John Nichols, he had won a string of easy reelection victories over second-rate-opponents. In 1977, he beat Ernest Browne, a bland, black city councilman, by some twenty points. Four years later, he whipped an unknown white accountant, Perry Koslowski, 63 percent to 37 percent. His last time out, in 1985, Young walked through a contest against another anonymous accountant, thirty-five-year-old Tom Barrow, 61 percent to 39 percent.
The mediocre quality of the opposition was not accidental; no serious politician wanted to take Young on. He had all the advantages of incumbency, including a multi-million-dollar campaign fund, an army of city workers, the support of organized labor and financial aid from the white surburban business establishment, which, whatever it thought of Young personally, counted on him to keep the city under control. Most important, he had the unshakable loyalty of the city’s black voters. To challenge him was to call into question the legitimacy of their revolution, and no ambitious black politician wanted to be accused of that.
All that was left was the ABC coalition—a steady 35 percent of the vote composed mostly of elderly white ethnics who lived on the city’s fringes, and a smattering of disgruntled blacks. To beat the mayor, somebody would have to find a way of holding the dissidents and, at the same time, making inroads into his core of black admirers.
In 1989, for the first time in sixteen years, it suddenly seemed possible. Young was on a losing streak—the casino gambling issue, the humiliating Jackson landslide in the 1988 Michigan presidential primary, the paternity suit—and he seemed old and vulnerable. The city’s problems were not getting any better, but Young appeared curiously detached, rarely venturing out of his office and mansion. Most important, a new generation of voters had grown up under black rule. According to the conventional wisdom, they regarded Coleman Young as a politician, not a savior. That was the feeling in the city: The old man could be taken.
In Detroit’s two-stage electoral system, a September primary free-for-all would be followed, in November, by a runoff between the two leading candidates. No one doubted that Young would be one of them, but there was stiff competition for the second slot. Four contenders eventually came forward—Tom Barrow, on a roll after having led the antigambling crusade in the summer of 1988; Erma Henderson, the septuagenarian president of the Common Council; Charles Costa, a Maltese immigrant businessman; and, most dramatically, thirteen-term U.S. Congressman John Conyers.
The first to declare was Costa, who cast himself as the great almost-white hope. On a morning in the late fall of 1988, he invited me to his downtown paint store-campaign headquarters for a briefing on his electoral strategy, which could best be described as flexible.
“I’m a chameleon,” he confided. “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal; I can be both. Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, they all think I’m one of them. And with blacks, well, I’m dark complected. They think I’m part black. I tell them that Malta is an island off the coast of Africa.”
Costa is a small, compelling man in his fifties, with white hair and piercing brown eyes, who came to America at age sixteen, started out as an announcer at the Stone Burlesque, mastered the essentials of business (“I can play that Jewish piano, you know, the cash register”) and eventually became a major inner-city landlord. At his peak, he had some five thousand tenants, but he went bankrupt in 1971. Undaunted, he commissioned a biography, which he called Slumlord, and set himself up in the paint business, where he has flourished.
“I’m capable of thinkin’ in the fourth dimension,” he said in a voice ringing with conviction. “What other candidate can say that? In my life I’ve done things that are incredible. I’m calculative and from a PR point of view, ain’t nobody who can beat me. I shall climb my mountain.”
There is a certain fourth-dimensional aspect to Costa’s surroundings. He has five talking parrots in his office, a Pac-man machine, four life-sized teddy bears seated around a card table, and hundreds of antique clocks, blunderbusses, electric trains, stuffed animals, figurines, wagon wheels, model ships in bottles and other such collector’s items. His floors are covered with carpets of all nationalities, the walls adorned with uncountable pictures—mostly of Costa himself, including one taken with Ronald Reagan—busts of American presidents, a lifetime membership plaque from the NAACP and, displayed prominently, a photograph of Coleman Young.
“Coleman is going to be history. His own people are going to put me in office,” said the Maltese challenger. “Blacks want a change. They know their own can’t cut it. I’m white but I’m not too white. I’m just right for the transition. And I talk their language. I’ve got soul.”
To demonstrate, Costa called over a customer, a thin black man in a painter’s hat. He advised the man on the best kind of paint to buy. “And don’t forget to make a profit on the deal; that’s how you grow,” he said in a fatherly tone.
“Hey, man, I been doin’ this for eight years,” said the painter.
Costa shrugged. Okay, okay, just trying to help,” he said.
Despite his chameleon-based appeal to blacks, Costa was counting mainly on substantial white support. “Thirty-five percent of the vote in Detroit is white, and historically whites vote five to one for a white candidate against a black,” he explained. “Last time two thirds of the whites didn’t vote. But this time, I’ll bring them out.”
Costa was careful to point out that this strategy was not antiblack. “Most white people perceive all blacks as bad,” said the candidate, displaying his liberal side. “In fact, only seventy-five thousand to a hundred thousand are undesirables. The rest are fine.
“I know there might be some opposition who would like to keep Coleman in,” he continued. “They might try to stop me. I still could be assassinated. They could drive by right now and throw a firebomb through the window. I’m not afraid, but that don’t prevail me from thinkin’ about it.”
Morbidity does not come naturally to the ebullient Costa, however; he is a positive thinker who likes to get out on the campaign trail and mingle with the voters. That morning he loaded a batch of “Costa for Mayor” posters and leaflets into his car and headed off to press the flesh. His destination was a downtown residential hotel, its check-in counter protected by bulletproof glass. “A guy got shot here by a guy with no legs,” he said, laughing, amused by the endless vagaries of Detroit’s human comedy.
In the airless lobby, Costa passed out literature and made small talk with the elderly white men who make up the hotel’s main clientele. A toothless fellow dressed in a dirty flannel work shirt and jeans approached, and Costa handed him a campaign leaflet. “I’m running for mayor, and I’d like your support,” he said.
The man looked at him in disbelief. “Forget it, buddy,” he said. “You’re the wrong color. In this city, white people are toilet paper.”
After a few more handshakes, we took the rickety elevator upstairs to meet with the hotel manager, an old friend whom Costa wanted to enlist in the campaign. The manager greeted him cordially, but he was less interested in politics than in battlefield stories.
“Hey, I went to see a building that’s in receivership,” he said. “I get there and as soon as I come up to the door, a guy with his hands tied behind him comes flying out the window. How about that?”
This precipitated a whole series of guys-falling-out-of-windows anecdotes, each gruesome, each told with the special relish that white Detroiters use when they deplore their city’s violence. “You know, the place looks worse to me than ever,” said the manager. “I personally think that anyone who stays in Detroit willingly is a real asshole.”
“I’m gonna turn things around,” said Costa.
His friend regarded him with good-natured skepticism. “They’ve been saying that it’s gonna turn around for twenty years, Chuck,” he said. “No offense, but if God performed a miracle, could you think of anything He could do to save this city?
The Young camp was not particularly disturbed by the Costa challenge (when I mentioned Costa to Bob Berg, he looked at me blankly and said, “Chuck who?”); to make the primary, he would have to get a majority of the white vote—and that was going to Tom Barrow.
Barrow is a handsome, open-faced accountant of forty, with a neat mustache, an Ivy League wardrobe and a manner to match. In 1985, running as a complete unknown, he got about two thirds of the white vote. Whites liked him for two reasons: first, he wasn’t Coleman Young; and second, he was a modest, businesslike coalition builder who made it a point to reach out to them.
Unfortunately for Barrow, these same qualities were interpreted by blacks as a lack of ethnic authenticity. In a city where blackness is equated with street-smart militance, he didn’t seem like the real thing. Over and over, Barrow, the cousin of folk hero Joe Louis, was reduced to claiming, “I’m just as black as the rest of ’em,” but no one believed him. “Coleman is hot black coffee,” a woman told me. “Barrow is decaffeinated.” In the election of 1985, Barrow got less than one third of the black vote.
“He doesn’t even curse,” a reporter said of the challenger. “He thinks it’s a bad example for kids. He says he’s going to beat the heck out of Coleman. I’ll bet Big Daddy is just shaking in his boots.”
In 1985, Young’s method of dealing with Barrow had been to ignore him; the mayor barely bothered to campaign. This time, however, Barrow seemed more formidable, coming off his success in leading the fight against casino gambling. Polls showed him trailing the mayor by a relatively small margin. The 1985 run had given him name recognition and experience. He was also better organized, thanks to Geoffrey Garfield, a pudgy, bespectacled, black political consultant from New York who once worked with David Dinkins.
Barrow’s 1989 strategy was simple. He would keep his white base and concentrate on making inroads in the black community. Barrow could not hope to compete with Young’s civil rights credentials or signifying street style, but he thought he could attract support from young black professionals and tap into the dissatisfactions of other middle-class voters who cared more about safe streets, good schools and clean neighborhoods than about the ideology of liberation.
Nobody knew quite what Erma Henderson’s stategy was, and it didn’t matter much. Henderson, an ordained minister, was the president of the Detroit Common Council, a body with about as much influence as the Albanian parliament. Her power base was among elderly churchwomen, not enough to make her a serious threat. Henderson’s main contribution to the campaign was an uncharacteristically shrill attack on the mayor’s strategy, which she said was “the way Hitler came to power.” “Erma’s a fine lady,” a Young aide told me afterward. “She just got a little carried away.” After the primary, to show there were no hard feelings, the mayor named a city park after her.
As the September contest neared, the smart money in Detroit was on Barrow to finish second—and second, again, in November. But then, in the end of July, John Conyers suddenly announced that he was in the running, and it was a whole new race.
Conyers was just what the ABC people had been waiting for—a real contender. He had been in Congress since 1964, and his name was almost as well known as Young’s. He had solid civil rights credentials and a reputation for militance that matched the mayor’s. He also had a solid base of support in his west side district and access to money: his brother, Nathan, owns a Ford dealership that grossed $21 million in 1987.
For sixteen years, Coleman Young had been fighting lightweights, opponents who came out for the opening bell, sparred tentatively and went down for the count, pleased to have lasted a round or two with the champ. But Conyers was a heavyweight; Young finally would be fighting in his class. Even people who did not like the congressman were excited at the prospect of a brawl.
Conyers came out swinging. “It’s all over, Big Daddy,” he warned at his first press conference, sounding like the young Cassius Clay hollering at Sonny Liston. No one could recall another opponent talking so brashly to the mayor.
On Labor Day, the unions staged their annual parade down Woodward Avenue. Conyers marched the 1.2 miles to the podium; Young walked a block, then got in his official limo and rode the rest of the way. A reporter asked the congressman if this was a sign that the mayor was old and burned out.
“Don’t make me answer that question,” Conyers said. “I might have to apologize.”
Conyers kept jabbing away. He called the chief of police, William Hart, “the dumbest cop on the force.” He also challenged Young’s hostile suburb remark by coming out for regional disarmament. “As long as we tell all the suburbs that we’re not giving up our guns, I don’t know how we expect them to give up their guns,” he said.
The loser in the early stages of Conyers’s campaign was Tom Barrow. A poll taken a few days after the congressman announced his candidacy showed him fourteen points ahead of Barrow, and within shouting distance of Young. Conyers’s smooth, elegant style and Washington credentials were cutting into the black middle-class support that Barrow needed to finish in the running. A Young-Conyers face-off appeared to be a certainty.
But then, Conyers’s campaign began to unravel. An aide, Sam Riddle, resigned, claiming that people around the congressman were using drugs. Conyers himself refused on principle to take a drug test, stirring up inevitable speculation. When he finally bowed to public pressure and took the test, he came up “clean as the Board of Health,” but the affair made him look indecisive and a bit suspicious.
There were other problems. Conyers, a bachelor, became the focus of a nasty whispering campaign about his personal life. There were also snide comments about his less than distinguished legislative record. “The only thing John did this term was get a resolution creating National Tap Dance Day,” a Young supporter said.
Conyers told reporters that Jesse Jackson was coming to the city to campaign for him, but Jackson never made it, and waited until three days before the primary to release a letter endorsing him. He began missing meetings, or showing up hours late, and it became apparent that he couldn’t even run his own schedule. John Conyers might once have been a heavyweight, but after twenty-five years of running almost unopposed in a safe district, he was in no shape for a championship fight. On primary night, Tom Barrow held his white vote and got enough black support to beat Conyers, 24 percent to 17 percent. Henderson and Costa, the Maltese chameleon, each got about 4 percent. Coleman A. Young came in first with just over half the votes.
Five days after the primary, the Free Press published a poll on the issues that most interested voters. It showed their most pressing concerns to be crime (21 percent); drugs (16 percent); conditions in the neighborhoods (16 percent); and schools (14 percent). The same survey revealed that, if the election were held the next day, 45 percent would vote for Young and 36 percent for Barrow; 19 percent were undecided. The Free Press concluded that the poll “lends credence to the notion that Young may have slipped to his most vulnerable point in four terms as mayor.”
Barrow, adrenaline pumping from his primary showing, was encouraged by the numbers. He intended to campaign on two basic issues—quality of life and competent management—and to charge the mayor with responsibility for the disastrous shape of the city after sixteen years of inept government.
The Barrow approach elicited support where he least needed it—in the white community. A week after the primary, Chuck Moss, a columnist for the conservative Detroit News, compared the Young era with the pre-glasnost U.S.S.R., and heralded Barrow as an example of the new generation of black leaders that would bring about a change:
… old Detroit, where a monolithic black community supported a monolithic power structure, is crumbling. Much is due to a natural changing of the generational guard, much to the specific discrediting of Mayor Coleman Young and a lot is due to the failure of the current black leadership’s general outlook and policies.
… the first generation black leaders, whose stuggles brought political power, are being crowded by a new generation that is more interested in results than oratory. The Youngs … are being slowly supplanted … by snappy, savvy brokers who realize black America must move beyond its ethnic hearth to progress.
Moss saw Barrow—and Barrow saw himself—as one of the new, savvy brokers, who could reach out to white people, talk their language and aspire to mainstream American values. “… we as black people are going to have to stop blaming and pointing the finger at the white folks,” Barrow said in a News interview. “We are running the police department, the fire department … We have a black City Council, a black mayor, a black school board, a black superintendent. But look at our quality of life. We are not demanding from them what we would demand from a white person doing the same job.…”
Barrow was doing something daring: He was running in the black polis as an American politician who happened to be black. He was a liberal yuppie, a product, not of the civil rights movement or the unions, but of higher education, affirmative action and his own hard work. It was difficult to imagine him unemployed, “driving a little taxi, handling a little beef,” as Young had; harder still to picture him defiantly facing down the suburbs. Cooperation and accountability were his issues; he was offering the city American-style good government.
Young had no intention of going along. This was Detroit, not America, and in the black polis, all politics are ultimately about race. The mayor did not object to competence (a good case could be made that he is a far better manager than Barrow), but it was beside the point. To him, the issue was, as always, protecting Detroit’s black integrity and independence from the suburbs.
In previous campaigns, the mayor had received unwitting help in this strategy from his angry neighbors on the other side of Eight Mile Road. But by 1989, the white abandonment of Detroit—emotional as well as physical—was so complete that the suburbanites barely noticed that an election was taking place. Young’s favorite nemesis, Brooks Patterson, was practicing law and keeping quiet. The other Coleman-bashers held their peace. There was an eerie silence from across the border.
The mayor had to create his own targets, and he chose two: Tom Barrow himself and the news media. He portrayed his opponent as a stalking horse for suburban interests, and cast the press, especially the two daily newspapers, as Trojan horses within the gates of the city.
Young made a policy of not mentioning his opponent by name, but the accusation against Barrow was plain enough. During an interview with the editorial board of the Detroit News, he called the challenger a fifth columnist.
Q: You have sided with those of your supporters who have charged your opponent, Tom Barrow, as representing the interests of white suburbanites who want to reclaim control of the city …
A: You are putting words in my mouth now, but okay.”
Q: But you did not refute …
A: It’s up to me to refute it? I think that the words speak for themselves and the numbers speak for themselves.
The numbers that Young refered to were dollars—52 percent of the $211,000 that Barrow had raised for his primary came from suburban donors or from other, presumably white, outsiders. This was meant to constitute proof that the challenger was actually a tool of the hostile foreign power beyond Eight Mile Road.
Coming from Young, this was a bold accusation. The mayor went into the campaign with a multi-million dollar war chest, and he kept raising money up to election day. Some of these funds came from celebrity admirers such as the Four Tops, who gave him $300 in 1987 ($75 per Top), but most was donated by less disinterested sources. In 1988, for example, 22 percent was given by city employees, such as Police Chief Hart ($1,200), who did the right thing; and 37 percent more came from people or companies who had done business with the city in the previous three years.
Interestingly, almost 45 percent of the mayor’s cash flowed in from out of town, most of it from the suburbs. This irony did not escape the News editorial board.
Q: The fact is, you have accepted five times as much money [as Barrow] from people who live outside the city.
A: That’s because I have raised five times as much money.
Q: Does that suggest that you also have …
A: It means I’m five times as effective, that’s what it suggests.
Young had no ready explanation for why so many hostile white suburbanites gave him money. Cynics said that it might have something to do with the fact that many of them did business with the city, but June Roselle, the mayor’s chief fund-raiser, had a different theory. “People know that the mayor enjoys getting contributions,” she told me one night at a donor’s affair. “And they like to make him happy.”
During Young’s session at the News, he exchanged heated words with a young black reporter, Yolanda Woodlee, who, the mayor thought, was questioning him too aggressively about a report that his ally, Councilman Nicholas Hood, had been guilty of financial improprieties. “I know what you’re trying to do,” snapped Young. He turned angrily to Woodlee’s boss, editor-in-chief Robert Giles. “You ought to give her a raise,” he said with heavy sarcasm.
A few days later, in an interview with the black-owned Michigan Chronicle, the mayor publicly labeled Woodlee an Aunt Jemimah, the female equivalent of an Uncle Tom. His implication was clear: the reporter had sold out to her white, anti-Detroit bosses. The slur, which hurt Woodlee deeply, wasn’t personal, however; it was simply part of the broad Young strategy to paint the press as a subversive enemy of the black polis.
The antimedia theme emerged early in the campaign. Before the primary, the Black Slate, political arm of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, published a warning to black voters: “The powerful white news media is [sic] fighting to reestablish white control of Detroit. Only the reelection of Coleman Young and incumbent black councilmen will enable us to save our city!”
The Young camp heartily seconded the warning. “I think there’s an element of self-determination [in the Slate’s statement], and I think that self-determination is a legitimate factor of American politics,” said David Lewis, the mayor’s reelection chairman.
In the primary, the News endorsed Barrow, and the Free Press, a traditional Young supporter, went for Conyers. During the general election, both papers came out for Barrow. This played right into the mayor’s hands. He offered the endorsements as proof that the white-owned-and-operated press was trying to brainwash Detroiters into voting against their own interests.
“They can’t see for us, they can’t think for us,” he told a black audience at a fund-raiser at Steve’s Soul Food Restaurant. “They don’t tell it like it is, they tell it the way they would like it to be. It’s too late in my life to start dancing—I don’t dance. And I ain’t got no rhythm anyhow.” The crowd laughed and cheered, and Young grinned, shoulders shaking. “This election should be a declaration of independence,” he said. “We took our freedom in 1973, and they’re trying to take it back from us in 1989.”
The mayor repeated this message in every stump speech and interview throughout the campaign. Indeed, it often appeared that he was running for reelection against the Free Press and the News. When the papers counterattacked by condemning Young’s antipress message as reverse racism, he was ready for them. “I’ve always fought for unity between black and white,” he told J. P. McCarthy, a popular radio talk show host. “I think my record on that is a little better than the Detroit News. Fifty percent of my appointees are white. I don’t think the News can say that.”
The antipress fever of the Young campaign ran so high that it even infected the Barrow camp. One Saturday morning in mid-October I dropped in at his headquarters, a large storefront next to the towering General Motors Building on Grand Boulevard. The large main room was decorated like a child’s birthday party, with balloons and streamers. Donuts and coffee were set out on a long table. The walls were plastered with pictures of the candidate, district voting charts and handmade homilies, such as GOD DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE BLACK OR WHITE; THERE’S SOMEBODY TRYING TO PULL US APART.
Campaign workers, about half of them white, sat on folding chairs and waited for Geoffrey Garfield, Barrow’s consultant, to call the assembly to order. As usual, the meeting began with a gospel song—“The things I used to do, I don’t do no more, since Jesus came into my life”—and a benediction. Most of the ministers in town were supporting Young, but Barrow had a few clerical dissidents, and one of them offered a long, special anti-Coleman prayer.
After the last amen, Garfield opened the session to general discussion. Several people reported progress in their districts and were rewarded with applause. Then, without warning, a man arose and turned toward the back of the room, in the direction of a young black reporter named Dori Maynard.
“There’s a woman back there, works for the Free Press,” he said, pointing her out. “Last week, Coleman called her ‘a stupid fool,’ and she didn’t report it. Now she turns around and blasts us, yes she does!” An angry murmur rose from the crowd. Maynard, uncomfortable at having become the center of attention, shifted her weight from foot to foot.
Another man stood up smiling, and for a moment I thought he was going to defend the reporter. “We welcome you,” he said in a gracious voice. There were protests from the crowd, but he held up his hand for silence. “Yes we do, we welcome you. But we pray for your soul.”
The question of black control not only dominated the race for mayor, it became an issue in the Common Council election as well. In the primary, a white incumbent with impeccable liberal credentials named Maryanne Mahaffey led the field. A similar showing in the general election would make her president of council. In Detroit’s strong mayor system, the body is little more than a debating society, but there was symbolic importance in keeping the office in black hands, and Young came out for Reverend Nicholas Hood.
The mayor didn’t want to expressly say that he favored a black candidate, but he didn’t need to. Shortly after the primary, Reverend Jim Holley, now officially neutral despite his Joshua-time rhetoric of the previous year, reminded voters that if Mahaffey were elected president of the council, she would automatically be next in line in case something happened to Young. He called on black Detroiters to prevent such an eventuality by supporting Hood.
Holley was strongly criticized by many black journalists and politicians, who saw voting for a qualified white as an opportunity to display noblesse oblige. Young, however, refused to disassociate himself from the remark. Late in the campaign, when it appeared that Mahaffey would, indeed, come in first, he went further, telling audiences that Holley had raised “a legitimate issue.”
Yet, for all the emotions that the Mahaffey affair engendered, it was a secondary issue. The real race was for mayor, and in late October, Young staged a coup that staggered the Barrow camp.
For weeks, the challenger had been dickering with his defeated primary opponents for their support. Conyers had publicly promised to come out for him; Costa was supposedly brokering the deal. There were also rumors that Jesse Jackson, who had endorsed Conyers in the primary, and whose hatred for Young was well known, would come to Detroit to stump for Barrow. Conyers’s and Jackson’s support would go a long way toward defusing charges that Barrow was a tool of the white interests.
In late October, Jackson did come to town—but not to campaign for Barrow. On an overcast Friday afternoon, just as the shift at the Chrysler plant was about to change, a long convoy of large black cars, led by the mayor’s Cadillac, rolled up Jefferson Avenue to the factory gate. Uniformed policemen opened the rear doors and the mayor emerged—followed by Jesse Jackson.
The two men stood side by side and shook hands with a stream of workers. Young wore a statesmanlike gray homburg, a pearl gray overcoat, and the delighted expression of a magician who has just pulled an especially elusive rabbit out of the hat. Jackson, bareheaded and coatless, looked like his son. The men smiled and joked with the crowd while a handful of Barrow protesters circled, shouting “Why, Jesse, why?” in denunciation of the sellout.
It was fine political theater, and it was only the first act. From the factory, Young and Jackson drove to the mayor’s mansion on the Detroit River, where a group of reporters was assembled in the basement rumpus room. Jackson and Young disappeared upstairs, leaving the journalists to cool their heels, gaze longingly at the well-stocked white leather bar in the corner and make ribald remarks about the mayor’s love life.
A television reporter picked up a red-and-gray booklet from a coffee table and began to thumb through it. Entitled Hit the Road, in honor of Young’s famous challenge to the city’s hoodlums, it was written by someone called “King George” Cunningham, Jr., and published in 1974. Several of the journalists gathered around and guffawed at Cunningham’s overblown prose. “Look at this,” one said, turning to page 19, and read aloud: “Thank you, Jesus. We’ve got a new god, Coleman.”
“That’s enough to turn you into an atheist, right there,” a cameraman said.
On page 16, Cunningham had listed “Some Good Things About Detroit”:
Detroit is one of the few cities in the world where a worker can earn $1,000 a month—or learn a shop trade and earn $1,500 and more a month—buy a new home, two or three cars, a boat, a Saturday Night Special, a camping trailer, dabble in the stock market, play the numbers daily and the lottery weekly.
“Well, you can still get a Saturday Night Special and play the numbers,” a white reporter said, laughing. A black radio newsman, who overheard the remark, scowled but said nothing.
A few minutes later, Young and Jackson came in, accompanied by Conyers, Costa and a Henderson aide. They were there, Jackson said, to formally endorse the mayor. Conyers seemed uncomfortable with his about-face, and embarrassment played hell with his normal eloquence. “Any previous promises to support anyone are abrogated,” he said, “and any other assumptions, implied or otherwise, that I endorse him, of course, don’t exist.” Costa beamed, pleased that his fourth-dimensional powers had elevated him to such lofty company. Henderson’s man, asked if his presence meant that Henderson also supported Young, confined himself to a laconic “It does.” Most of the talking was done by Jackson, who said that endorsing the mayor “will regroup our family.”
There was no doubt which family he meant, or who wasn’t in it. Jackson, the favorite son of the black political clan, was telling Detroit that Big Daddy was still pater familias. Tom Barrow was, at best, a stepson.
Barrow’s people tried to put the best face on things. They charged that Jackson’s endorsement had been bought, and that Conyers was trying to protect his congressional seat from the wrath of the Young machine. “They brought the big guns out on me, and that means we got the big boys upset,” Barrow said.
In fact, Barrow had a point. The mayor, who had barely campaigned in previous elections, was, by his standards, running hard. Bringing in Jackson was an indication that he was taking the challenger seriously; in past years, he wouldn’t have bothered.
A few days later I bumped into Young at the City County Building. He was in a good mood, but cautious about his chances. “Things look pretty good right now,” he conceded, “but you can never be too sure of anything in politics. It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.”
The mayor’s caution was based on arithmetic. “We’ve got eighty-five percent of the white vote,” Barrow’s advisor, Geoffrey Garfield told me. “To beat us, Coleman needs eighty percent of the black vote, and with the city in the shape it’s in, there’s no way he’s gonna get it.” Young, who was counting ballots when Garfield was still learning addition and subtraction, knew that he would need a large black turnout. He also knew where to find his voters—in church.
Throughout the campaign, the mayor refused to attend Candidate Nights or to press flesh in the neighborhoods. He spent his weekdays acting mayoral, cutting ribbons on new projects and issuing statements about municipal affairs. But every Sunday morning, the normally irreverent Young donned a double-breasted silk suit and, at the head of a ten-car motorcade, made the rounds of the city’s churches.
One Sunday toward the end of the campaign I joined the cavalcade, which commenced at Sacred Heart, a downtown Catholic church with a decidedly Baptist flavor. Its choir is accompanied by drums, an organ and a saxophone, and the worshipers clap and sing along in fine down-home style. A song was just ending when Young swept in, accompanied by Barbara Rose Collins, who was running for reelection to the Common Council.
Things had not gone well for Collins since her near defeat of George Crockett the year before. In the spring, her son, Tony, had been shot in a street altercation. A few months later, he was caught holding up a suburban sporting-goods store, and was awaiting sentencing. Her son’s problems had distracted Collins, and she had not run her usual strenuous campaign; now, she was counting on Young’s coattails to carry her to victory.
Young and Collins were seated on the pulpit. A priest read from Second Timothy: “You, for your part, must remain faithful to what you have learned, because you know who your teachers are.” Young nodded, appreciating the sentiment, and he took up the text to remind the congregation of what they had learned in Detroit. He talked about the achievements of his administration and blasted the press. “There are people who don’t admit the progress that we have made,” he said. “They have eyes, but they will not see. They have ears, but they will not hear. They have mouths, but they will not speak the truth. And,” he snapped, “on top of that, they’re liars,” The crowd cheered, Young thanked the priest for allowing him to deliver his message, waved to the congregation and left. The whole thing had taken fifteen minutes.
The mayor repeated his speech in four more churches that morning. Everywhere he was greeted as an old friend. Some of the ministers seemed to take a special pleasure in welcoming the profane, “not too moral” mayor of Motown.
“Several years ago, Coleman came to a group of us preachers and asked us to pray for him,” a Baptist pastor told his flock. “He asked us to pray that he stop smoking and stop cussing. We told him, ‘Mayor, we’ll pray for you to quit smoking, but not to quit cussing—’cause there’s some folks need to be cussed out.” The congregation laughed, and Young chuckled, eyes crinkled shut and shoulders working.
On the way out of the St. Stephen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, the mayor spotted me in the crowd of reporters and stopped for a minute.
“What the hell you doin’ out here?” he asked with mock surprise.
“Working, same as you,” I told him. Young laughed. “Well, if you’re the same as me, this ought to last you for the next four years,” he said, and climbed into his limo.
That morning, Barrow was also hitting the churches. Since I already knew Young’s “eyes and will not see, mouths and will not speak the truth” routine by heart, a Free Press reporter and I left the mayor and went to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, a subdued, middle-class institution, where the challenger was scheduled to appear. We were seated in the corner of a small balcony that enabled us to see the pulpit without, apparently, being seen.
Barrow received a polite reception when he was introduced to the congregation, and he began his remarks by bowing his head slightly and saying, “I want to give honor to God, who is the head of my life.” Several old women sitting nearby nodded their heads emphatically; Barrow is the kind of young man that devout old ladies appreciate.
The challenger launched into his usual “time for a change” message, emphasizing the need for city services and sound fiscal management that would concentrate on improving the quality of life. But then, unexpectedly, he veered off into a defense of his own racial authenticity. He mentioned the fact that he had been born in Black Bottom and raised on the east side, in a black neighborhood, and he recalled boyhood trips to the segregated South. “I remember having to drink out of the colored water fountain,” he said, his flat Michigan inflection taking on a southern tone. “The water pressure was so bad that we had to put a Popsicle stick under the button to get a drink.” The story reminded me of Helen Livingstone Bogle’s struggle to get a telephone at the Art Institute; some people just don’t make convincing victims.
“They say I’m gonna turn this city back to white folks,” he thundered. “Well, that’s ridiculous. We don’t need anyone from outside the city to tell us how to run our own lives. Y’all know that it’s easy to sit out there and tell us what to do!” The Free Press man raised his eyebrows; Barrow, the apostle of cooperation and harmony, was trying to out-Coleman Coleman.
After services, Barrow stood around outside shaking hands. When he saw the Free Press man he smiled broadly and waved him over. “Things are going just great,” he beamed, speaking in his normal Michigan tone. “You should have been in church this morning; I got a wonderful reception.”
“I was in there,” the reporter said. “You couldn’t see me, but I saw you.”
A troubled look came over Barrow’s open face, but he recovered quickly. “Hey, let me show you the latest computer printouts on our telephone surveys,” he said, opening a loose-leaf folder. “All our numbers show us running much stronger than anticipated among Coleman’s constituency.” Barrow went over the list of figures, an accountant safely in his element once again.
“When you say Coleman’s constituency, you’re talking about black voters, right?” I asked.
“That’s right,” he said, and then the troubled look returned. “Hey, we’re not writing off anyone,” he said. “I’ve got a whole lot of black folks supporting me.”
A horn blew and a black man stopped at a traffic light and called Barrow’s name. “Hey, man, how you doin’?” Barrow shouted back. The driver smiled and yelled, “Good luck, Tom.”
“See what I mean?” said Barrow. “Things are really coming together. We’re going to win, man, we’re definitely going to win.”
As the race came into the homestretch, polls continued to show Young leading by a substantial, but not decisive, margin. However, there was one more hurdle for the mayor to cross—Devil’s Night, which fell only eight days before the election.
Both Young and Barrow were keenly aware of the potential importance of Devil’s Night. In recent years there had been a steady annual decline in the number of fires. A further drop would underscore the mayor’s contention that things were turning around and that he had the city under control. On the other hand, serious arson couldn’t help but strengthen Barrow’s quality-of-life message. For the challenger, there was nothing to do but wait; but Young had an army at his disposal, and he deployed it to ensure tranquility.
The mayor declared the customary three-day dawn-to-dusk curfew for kids under eighteen. He also ordered the mobilization of every city vehicle, including garbage trucks, for street patrol duties. A volunteer force estimated by City Hall to number thirty thousand citizens was raised to keep watch over the neighborhoods, and a special command center was set up to enable motorists with car phones to dial WATCH and report fires. As an incentive for kids to stay at home, a local cable television station agreed to unscramble its signal so that the Pistons–76ers’ game would be available to nonsubscribers.
On the eve of Devil’s Night, Martin Luther King Jr. High School hosted a citywide youth rally under the slogan “Celebrate Halloween Right.” Homemade posters decorated the lobby. One pictured Batman holding a burning figure: “This may be you as a result of an arsonal fire,” it said. Another, showing Lucifer with pitchfork in hand, was captioned, “Stop the Devil from Destroying Our City.” Teachers and parents mingled with senior city officials, including the newly appointed fire chief, Harold Watkins, a tall, mocca-skinned man in a navy blue uniform and braided cap that made him look like the admiral of an African fleet.
In the large, modernistic auditorium, hundreds of kids listened to a performance by the police r&b band, the Blue Pigs (“We have an arresting sound”), who performed hits such as “That’s My Prerogative,” substituting anti–Devil’s Night lyrics for the original. Then, winners of a citywide essay competition took the stage to read their compositions. “Many Detroiters have left our city because of Devil’s Night and its consequences,” trilled a grammar school girl in a starched red dress and pigtails. “Let’s turn back the hands of time to when there was no guns, gangs or cocaine,” implored a junior high school coed. “Do the right thing, that’s where it’s at/Don’t kill kids with baseball bats,” declaimed a high school rapper.
The mayor was introduced to enthusiastic applause. “Devil’s Night is becoming more like any other night,” he said. “This year we should cooperate to see that there are less fires on Devil’s Night than any other night of the year. Now, will you help me to prove that those who say Detroit is dead are wrong?” Children and parents cheered and Young began to hand out prizes to the winners. “This is pathetic,” said a radio reporter. “In what other American city do kids get awards for writing about not burning down their own town?”
Young’s short speech struck me as an amazing gamble. I had expected him to lower public expectations, so that he could claim a post–Halloween success. Instead, he had belittled Devil’s Night and called for fewer fires than usual—a demand that would inevitably become the standard by which this year would be judged. “You think he knows something we don’t?” I asked the reporter, who shrugged. “He’s God,” he said. “Maybe he’s planning to make it rain.”
It didn’t. Devil’s Night was crisp and clear, and there was a feeling of expectation in the air as a group of fire buffs gathered for their traditional preholiday dinner at a McDonald’s on the far east side. There were eight of them, including two firemen from nearby Farmington, members of an informal Devil’s Night society that has been meeting for years. Over Big Macs and milk shakes they plotted their evening’s activity. The plan was to fan out to various parts of the city and to inform each other of good blazes by car phone.
I was invited to ride with Harvey and Si, two ex-Detroiters in their early fifties who now live in the suburbs. Like the others, they were equipped with a shortwave radio, street maps and a cellular phone. The didn’t intend to miss a thing. “If we catch one good house fire, the night will have been worthwhile,” Si said.
We hadn’t been cruising for more than fifteen minutes when a fire was reported on the west side. Harvey expertly navigated the freeways and pulled up in front of a flaming wood house several minutes before the fire trucks arrived. The street was filled with neighborhood people who greeted the suburban voyeurs without apparent resentment.
Next to the burning building a thin, youthful black man stood on his lawn and sprayed the side of his white-shingled house with a garden hose. The wind was blowing the other way, but the fire was close enough to cast him in dramatic outline, and press photographers crowded around. He ignored them as he sprayed, a look of intense, fearful concentration on his face.
In the street, in front of the house, I spotted John Aboud, the owner of the Tailwind. He had a minicamera on his shoulder, and he was bent on one knee, filming the scene. He looked up and waved in recognition. It had been almost a year since our last meeting.
“How’s it going, John?” I asked.
“My cousin was killed six weeks ago in a video store,” he said, giving me an update on his family body count. “That makes seven. And he had four kids, too.” He stared briefly at the flames leaping from the roof of the house to the telephone wires, sighed and then put the Minicam back on his shoulder.
A few minutes later the fire trucks began to arrive, and we watched for a while as they battled the blaze. The man with the garden hose ignored the engines and continued to spray his house. I felt a tap on my shoulder and saw Harvey. “Come on,” he said impatiently. “They’ve got this one under control. There’s supposed to be four houses going up on the east side.”
“Four?” asked his partner, Si. “That’s music to my ears.”
The report was only half true; when we reached our destination, a narrow residential street, there were two houses ablaze. One, reputedly a crack house, had already burned to the ground, leaving only a chimney. The other, which belonged to a family, was going fast. Its residents had already been taken to a shelter by emergency workers.
A television crew stood in the street, recording the scene while a blond reporter in a trenchcoat went from neighbor to neighbor, trying to get someone to say that the crack house had been torched. No one knew anything. “Coleman says we don’t have an arson problem here,” he said to a group of onlookers in a bitter tone. “Tell that to the lady whose house got burned down.”
“What you care, man?” asked a woman in a bathrobe and house shoes. “You don’t live ’round here noway.”
“Coleman gonna win, and if you think I’m lying, my mother is a bitch,” said a teenager, and a laugh went up. A look of disgust passed over the reporter’s face, and he walked away shaking his head.
“The only people who support Coleman are his constituents,” Si observed as we drove toward the next fire.
“The intelligence level of these people is so low that they don’t know they need a change,” agreed Harvey. He dialed a number on the car phone. “Hey,” he said into the receiver, “we had a good one over here, you got anything good over there?”
For the next few hours we hopped from fire to fire. A commercial building (“Probably for the insurance,” said Harvey), a few abandoned houses, several dumpsters. Harvey and Si were still waiting for the big one, and they were getting restless.
Finally a call came over the radio—an apartment building was ablaze in Highland Park. “Bingo,” said Si happily. “I know just where that is. We used to live around there.”
The apartment building was deserted, but flames shot out of its windows, and fire fighters clambered along the roof. Across the street, an old lady sat on the steps of the Greater Emmanuel Church of God in Christ. “I heard my church was on fire so I came right down here,” she said in a determined voice. “I’m on the Mothers Board, and I’m not letting anything hurt my church. I intend to sit here until the last fire truck leaves.”
Several people had gathered around the lady. One of them was a cop from New Jersey who had come to Detroit especially to observe Devil’s Night. “I have an M.A. in public safety,” he said, “but tonight I’m getting a Ph.D. in reality.”
Si and Harvey smiled at the compliment. “You picked a good year to come,” Harvey said. “This is much better than last year. But what the heck, good year, bad year, there’ll always be a Devil’s Night.”
The next day Bill Bonds, an outspoken anchorman on ABC-TV affiliate WXYT, delivered a furious commentary on the fires of Devil’s Night. “It was like a vision from hell,” he told viewers. “Well, people say, those yo-yos burn down their city every year, don’t they? But this year is different; this year, I’ve heard the words ‘who cares?’ ”
That more or less summed up the suburban attitude. But in the city, with a week to go before the election, Devil’s Night flared into a raging political controversy.
Tom Barrow struck first. Accompanied by reporters and press photographers, he toured the burned ruins, had his picture taken with victims and blasted the mayor. For months he had been talking about the declining quality of life and attacking Young for concentrating on grandiose buildings in the business district at the expense of the neighborhoods. Now he hammered home his point. “Just look at downtown,” he said in an I-told-you-so tone. “Everything’s fine down there. Nothing burned down there.”
For three days, city officials declined to publish Devil’s Night statistics; they wanted to wait until after Halloween and the end of what they called “the seventy-two-hour Devil’s Night period.” Young’s only comment was that the number of fires had been “about normal.” Off the record, the mayor’s people admitted that it might have risen slightly from the previous year’s 104.
That estimate was loudly disputed by the Firefighters Union, which also happened to be Barrow’s biggest financial supporter. Union officials claimed their men had fought 285 Devil’s Night fires—far more than in any of the previous four years, and almost as many as 1984’s all-time record of 297.
On the day after Halloween, Young finally called a news conference at the City-County Building. Dressed in a blue blazer and pink shirt, the mayor gave his version of what had happened. There had been 115 fires on Devil’s Night itself, he said—up slightly from the year before. But, for the overall three-day period, the number had declined. He pointed to a red-white-and-blue chart, which showed constant decreases for the “Devil’s Night period” since 1984. The mayor praised the community spirit of the thirty thousand patrol volunteers, saluted the city’s “outstanding effort” and then offered to answer questions.
The reporters sitting around the conference table seemed momentarily speechless. None of them knew exactly how many fires there had been, but they had been on the street on Devil’s Night, and they knew that it had been bad, certainly worse than the year before. They had come to the press conference expecting to hear a chastened mayor explain his failure; instead, he had declared victory.
The months of media bashing and personal attacks on journalists suddenly hung heavy over the crowded room. Young glowered at them, daring them to dispute his version of reality. Finally a reporter broke the silence. “Mr. Mayor, I don’t want to be critical, but …”
“Yeah, sure you don’t,” interrupted the mayor with heavy sarcasm. “None of you wants to be critical.”
For the next half hour, the mayor snapped and raged at the reporters. He answered their gentle queries with harsh denunciations, demanding to know if they dared to dispute his official figures, and then waiting for their docile “no sirs” before moving on. Despite the fact that at least twenty journalists were present, the silences between questions grew longer and longer.
Finally a TV correspondent in the back of the room spoke up.
“Mr. Mayor, what we really want to know is, well, did the number of fires actually go down this year or what?”
Young fixed him with an imperious stare. “What do you think?” he demanded. “You can see the chart.”
“Yes sir,” said the reporter. “But you’re the mayor, I want to know what you think.”
Young refused to be appeased. “You got a big opinion,” he said. “I hear it on television every night. Let’s hear what you think.” The reporter reddened like a schoolboy and said nothing. “Next question,” snapped the mayor.
At the end of the press conference, the journalists filed quietly out of the room. They had been intimidated and they knew it. I was standing in the hall with Bill McGraw of the Free Press when a young black radio reporter came over and introduced himself. “That was a good question you asked in there,” McGraw told him in an encouraging tone.
“I had another question,” said the radio man. “I wanted more sound. But when I talk to the Man, I walk on coals. Maybe when I get bigger, y’know?”
Young’s performance had won him a partial victory. The next day the press would report two sets of figures—his and the Firefighters Union’s—without being able to say which was correct. Now he had to find a way to make voters give him the benefit of the doubt.
That evening, Young attended a fund-raiser sponsored by the Black Firefighters organization. The affair was held in an elegant nightclub just inside the Eight Mile border. Soul Muzak played softly in the background and civil servants in their Sunday clothes lined up for a free buffet supper. These were the mayor’s people, beneficiaries of his affirmative action policies, and they were in a receptive mood.
Young began his remarks with a general overview of his accomplishments, among which he included the construction of town houses on the Detroit River. “You can drive into your garage, walk through the house and out the back door, get into your boat and float over to the marina,” he said. He was reminding them of their prosperity—and its source. Before Coleman Young, blacks in Detroit didn’t have boats—or jobs as fire fighters.
Then the mayor turned to the main business of the night, an attack on the lily-white leadership” of the Firefighters Union. “They oppose affirmative action,” he said, “and so does my opponent. My opponent supports that damn union. Now, that’s some kind of an uncle.… And he’s got the right first name for it, too.” The room burst into laughter and applause. Young joined them, shoulders shaking. “Back home they call that signifyin’,” he said.
And so, Devil’s Night was Colemanized. It had taken one day for him to turn the “vision from hell” into a racial confrontation, with the bigoted white fire fighters and Uncle Tom Barrow on one side and the signifying leader of the black polis on the other. Barrow didn’t even mention the conflagration during the last week of the campaign.
On the Sunday before the election, Coleman Young staged his final rally, at the New St. Paul’s Tabernacle. The street outside the large church was festooned with triangular red-and-white Young ’89 signs. Dozens of city employees loitered in front of the building, talking politics and sniffing the aroma of fried chicken that wafted over from the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner. From time to time a Barrow car cruised by, and the Colemanites hooted good-naturedly.
When I arrived, notebook in hand, some of them mistook me for a local newsman. “Quit tellin’ people what to think,” they shouted. “We’re gonna have the last laugh!” They weren’t able to put any real hostility in it though; they could parrot their boss’s phrases, but not his rage.
Inside, a large crowd filled the pews of the blue-carpeted sanctuary. As usual, virtually everyone was black; throughout the campaign, the mayor almost never appeared before a predominantly white audience. Special roped-off areas were reserved for “Clergy” and “Elected Officials.” There was no press section. I took a seat in the rear of the church, next to a Free Press reporter.
There was none of the rowdy energy normally associated with a political rally. Men and women sat in dignified silence, waiting for the mayor and Jesse Jackson, who was also scheduled to speak. Church ushers escorted latecomers to seats. An organ played quietly in the background.
A group of dignitaries, led by Pastor Charles Butler, came to the pulpit, and began to warm up the crowd. UAW vice-president Ernie Lofton delivered an impassioned attack on the press: “We have two papers in this town that can’t tell fact from fiction,” he hollered. “We remember what Detroit was like prior to Coleman Young and we didn’t like what we saw.” When he finished, the crowd gave the union official a warm hand. “Seems like Brother Lofton came here to preach today,” said Reverend Butler, getting an appreciative chuckle.
More brief remarks followed. An activitist from Operation Get-Down seconded the attack on the press. “We don’t listen to any local media and we don’t listen to any national media, either,” he said. Tom Turner of the AFL-CIO was the only speaker to even allude to Barrow. “I don’t recall Coleman’s opponent ever paying any dues,” he told them. The attack on Barrow got much less applause than the press-bashing.
The choir sang “Victory Shall Be Mine,” and the crowd, more like a congregation, swayed and clapped. Then Young and Jackson took the pulpit, accompanied by Aretha Franklin, dressed for church in a modest black brocade suit and white pearls. There was an excited buzzing in the audience—they hadn’t known that she was on the show.
Reverend Butler introduced the mayor in three words: “Behold the man.” The crowd rose and cheered as Young, dressed as usual in an elegant double-breasted suit, came to the rostrum. His remarks were short and surprisingly low-key. He talked briefly about his accomplishments, praised the church as a pillar of the community and called for racial harmony. “There are some who have mistaken African-American unity as antiwhite,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The proverbial visitor from Mars, landing at New St. Paul’s Tabernacle that afternoon, would have thought Coleman A. Young a conciliatory, statesmanlike old man with a very good tailor.
Then Aretha Franklin sang “Precious Lord,” the same song she sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. She was a little hoarse in the beginning, but her voice returned as she went along, and as she soared to the end, the Free Press man turned to me. Like the other reporters on the campaign trail, he had come in for a fair share of personal abuse. Now he had a beatific smile on his face. “Covering politics in Detroit has its compensations,” he said.
Jesse Jackson delivered the finale. He is to black political oratory what Franklin is to gospel music—an inspired, inspiring virtuoso—and he was at the top of his form that afternoon. “I’m here today for an emancipation rally,” he intoned. “The blood of Malcolm and Martin brings us to an emancipation rally. When they were needed, they were there. And when the roll was called, Coleman Young was there. He answered ‘Present.’ ”
Skillfully, Jackson contrasted the mayor’s long, distinguished civil rights record with that of his yuppie opponent. He talked about Young’s defiance of Jim Crow regulations in the army, of his battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee, of his dedication to black causes. “The most effective affirmative action policy for jobs and contracts in America is right here in Detroit, Michigan,” he said.
Then Jackson turned his rhetorical guns on Barrow. “They say he knows how to get along with white folks,” he thundered contemptuously. “Well, that’s no great accomplishment. That’s no special skill. African-Americans have always known how to get along with white people. We learned how to get along with white people during slavery. The time has come for white people to learn to get along with us.” The church rocked with applause and cheers.
Finally Jackson and the others held hands and led the audience in “We Shall Overcome.” For a moment it was 1963, and Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, was leading Martin Luther King up Woodward Avenue at the head of a giant crowd. Back then, no one could have imagined the Detroit of today. In that sense, they had overcome; self-determination was a fact of life. But there were other facts, too. Dr. King had been murdered by a racist, and Reverend Franklin by a criminal—victims of the polarities of black suffering. In 1989, no one was certain anymore who the real enemy was—them, or us.
No one, that is, but Coleman Young. He had built a black city-state in the heart of the American middle west, given his people a government that spoke their language, streets and parks named for their heroes, city jobs and contracts and more political control than blacks have ever had, anywhere, in North America. He had, more than any politician in the country, created a city in his own image.
The irony was that he, better than anyone, knew the terrible limitations of his achievement. The price of black control had been abandonment and antipathy. White people had taken their businesses and factories and fled; the motherfuckers had stolen the city’s boots along with its bootstraps. It was this certainty—that the hostility of the white press, the white suburbs and, by extension, white America was ultimately responsible for the plight of his city and his people—that enabled the most powerful man in Detroit to hold Aretha Franklin’s hand and, in a wobbly, off-key voice, to sing, with sincere defiance, “We Shall Overcome.”
They sang “We Shall Overcome” at Tom Barrow’s final rally, too, but with a different accent and a different meaning.
The rally, held on the eve of the election, began at Barrow’s headquarters. Clusters of black-and-white balloons hung from the ceiling, and clusters of black-and-white supporters waited for the candidate’s towering brother, Shorty, to form them into a line for the candlelight march up Woodward Avenue. One wall was dominated by a large placard: “God Bless America, Land of Opportunity.”
Shorty, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Joe Louis, called “Hey-yo, hey-yo” and began herding the marchers to the door, where each was given a lit candle. Barrow, dressed in an open-collared striped shirt, blue blazer and gray slacks, led the procession. At his side was Reverend William Quick, the white pastor of the largely white Metropolitan United Methodist Church, where the rally was to take place.
Quick and Barrow marched four blocks up Woodward Avenue to the church, past vacant lots and boarded-up pawnshops. They sang as they went, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna make it shine,” but there was no one to hear them; at 6:30 P.M., the sidewalks of Detroit’s main street were deserted, and only a trickle of cars drove past.
The procession wound past the apartment building of the black grandmother who had been propositioned by Floyd at my cocktail party, almost a year before. Once, driving by Metropolitan United, she had pointed out the church, an imposing building that dominates a city block. “Every Sunday I see those white folks coming in from the suburbs to go to church,” she said. “They come to thank God—they thank Him that they don’t have to live next to niggers.”
The Barrow crowd was thin enough to fit into the church’s small sanctuary without filling up the balcony. Naturally, the rally began with a prayer, and then a middle-aged white woman in a white dress and thick glasses sang “Be Not Afraid” in a Joan Baez-like soprano, accompanied by an elderly white woman on the organ.
Reverend Quick kicked off the speeches with a rousing denunciation of Coleman Young and all his works. The litany of sins included buying off Quick’s fellow divines. “Millions of dollars have gone to the churches,” he declaimed. “Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?” The whites applauded but many of the blacks looked quizzical; they were mad at Coleman, after all, not at Jesus.
Quick was followed by another white minister, and then a black woman. “When the wicked are removed, the people rejoice,” she quoted, bursting into tears. A collective “Aw” rose from the pews, and Barrow, on his way to the podium, hugged her.
Barrow’s text that night was his usual message of responsibility and racial cooperation. “We’re sick of crime, crack, hate and racism,” he told the audience. “We’re not going to blame the white folks. Nobody is going to save us from us but us …”
As he talked, several reporters in the balcony began to compare notes on the campaign. Judging by the rally, it seemed to me that Barrow had failed to galvanize much black support—the key to his strategy. But the others dissented. “Barrow says that he’s only three points back,” said a usually well-informed journalist. “He’s got a poll, and I believe it. There’s a hell of a lot of dissatisfaction out there.” He took out a piece of paper and wrote “Coleman 51%, Barrow 49%.” “And it could go the other way,” he said.
“… In order for Detroit to come back, we’ve got to bring the community back together,” yelled Barrow, coming to a close. “It’s time to stop thinking about black and white, city and suburbs. We’ve got to work together. United, we can make this a great city again.”
Reverend Quick came forward and held the candidate’s hand high in the air. The two men began to sing “We Shall Overcome” in a flat tone. The Barrow partisans joined in—“Black and white together, black and white to-ge-he-ther,” they sang, swaying gently in the pews. “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”
There was little doubt what the crowd had in mind; they intended to overcome Coleman Young, to liberate his liberated city, seize it from the forces of black self-determination and return it to America. Dr. King’s heir, Jesse Jackson, had been with Young at New St. Paul’s but his disciples, believers in assimilation and integration, were with the yuppie accountant at Metropolitan United Methodist.
Thus did the campaign of 1989 come to a close. Nominally it was a race for mayor of America’s sixth largest city, but there was much more at stake than who would occupy the Manoogian mansion for the next four years. There had been talk about housing and education, crime and clean streets, but despite Barrow’s best efforts, the city’s quality of life was never the main issue. The election was really about the black state of mind in a place where blacks are free to express themselves without worrying about white people.
The campaign posed serious ideological questions that went far beyond the specifics of Detroit. What is the root cause of the desperate condition of African-America—black irresponsibility or white racism? What is the best way for African-Americans to progress—self-rule or a junior partnership with whites? Is defiant struggle merely an evolutionary step toward inclusion in the broader American polity—or is it, in the words of Ronald Hewitt, the best that blacks can hope for in the United States? In a very real sense, the election in Detroit was a referendum on the contemporary black interpretation of reality.
On election day, the voters of America’s African-American capital returned their verdict, and it wasn’t even close. Coleman Young was reelected by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, with almost 70 percent of the black vote (and only 13 percent of the whites). Detroit, the city with the country’s highest rate of teenage murder, unemployment and depopulation, twelve thousand abandoned homes, a Third World infant mortality rate and an epidemic drug problem, had spoken: Four More Years.
That night, the citizens of the black polis came together to celebrate the fifth consecutive victory of Coleman Alexander Young. Several thousand people packed Cobo Hall, the convention center on the river—executives with gleaming, gold-rimmed glasses and thousand-dollar suits and street people in jeans and torn sweaters; churchwomen wearing crosses large enough to frighten vampires and stylish ladies in ball gowns and glittering jewelry; aging auto workers sporting UAW jackets and young Muslims dressed in white robes and skullcaps. The mayor’s rainbow coalition ranged from coal black to light tan—there weren’t more than a couple of dozen whites at the celebration.
The Muslims and church ladies munched sedately on catered fried chicken while the others bellied up to the bar for drinks at $3.50 a shot. Giant speakers poured out r&b and several hundred young people did the electric boogie, moving together in coordinated lines like Fred Busby dancers. A young black reporter from the News, attending her first election night bash, surveyed the room with wonder. “The mayor sure knows how to throw a party,” she said.
Close to midnight, “Respect” came blaring over the loudspeakers and Coleman Young took the stage, accompanied by an entourage that included a rotund black woman in a red dress. The crowd screamed “Four more years!” and the mayor smiled and waved. Then the woman, whose name was Gloria McKee, took the microphone and sang—“You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” She finished to loud applause, and the mayor seized the microphone. “The lady has sung,” he announced, and the room burst into appreciative laughter.
Suddenly Young turned serious and statesmanlike. “We should join in the spirit of democracy here by extending the hand of unity, brotherhood and friendship,” he told his followers. “Let us all come forward together now and move this city forward. Let us join hands across Eight Mile Road. We can’t make it without the suburbs, and they can’t make it without us.”
“He sounds like Tom Barrow tonight,” I remarked to the News reporter. “He wants harmony with the white folks.”
“There’s only one difference,” she said. “Coleman wants it on his terms.”
That, indeed, was the difference, not only between Young and Barrow, but between him and the other two black candidates who won major victories that night. Young congratulated David Dinkins, for being elected mayor of New York, and L. Douglas Wilder, for winning the governorship of Virginia. Television pundits were already heralding them as harbingers of the new black politician—moderate, mainstream liberals, successful because they eschewed racial rhetoric. But in Detroit, they wouldn’t have had a chance. In the city that has so often been the true bellwether of black America, Dinkins and Wilder were yesterday, not tomorrow.
A few days after the election, News columnist Chauncey Bailey, a thoughtful man whom Coleman Young once branded an Uncle Tom, explained why.
Observers miss the point when they suggest that Young is less of a historical figure because he does not come across as “moderate” as do other African-American leaders now making inroads in less black cities, and is therefore out of step with a “new generation” of leadership.
Only New York City and Chicago have more African-American residents than Detroit. New York is 25 percent African-American and has just elected its “first black” mayor. Chicago is 40 percent African-American but lost power when African-Americans showed disunity. Due to their racial makeups, leaders in those cities must be more moderate to win. But Detroit is where more big cities will be in coming decades. Young’s legend will be the model, not a myth, that many will turn to.
Bailey’s prediction reminded me of something I had heard more than a year earlier from Father William Cunningham, a very savvy white priest who has worked in the inner city for twenty years. “Detroit is the center of an American revolution,” he had told me. “We’re twenty years ahead of Chicago, forty years ahead of New York City. God knows where we are in comparison to San Diego. In terms of civil rights, this is Broadway. There’s no place else where black power has spoken like it has in this city. And what happens here will eventually happen in the rest of the country.”
After his acceptance speech, Coleman Young met with the press in a small room off the main hall. He sat in an upholstered wing chair and the reporters gathered around him like eager children before a grumpy uncle. They had been through a long, bitter campaign, in which he had turned them into targets. Now they were clearly hoping that Young’s conciliatory mood would lead to an armistice.
The old man seemed to be in a mellow mood. He told them that this was the happiest night of his life; every victory, he explained, is sweeter than the ones before. He smiled and they smiled back, glad to be sharing a pleasant moment.
“But aren’t you a little bit disappointed by the results?” asked a young black newsman. Suddenly, the mayor bristled.
“What the hell you talkin’ about?” he demanded. “I won, didn’t I?”
The reporter was taken aback by his tone, but he persisted. “Yes, but, I mean, you didn’t do quite as well this time as you did in the past …”
“Do you know what I got in the past?” Young demanded.
“Yes sir,” said the reporter, assuming the question to be rhetorical. “And I wanted to know—”
“Well, what did I get?” Young demanded. “How many votes did I get in previous elections?”
The reporter stood in embarrassed silence and his colleagues regarded him nervously. They were sympathetic, but they didn’t want to get into this particular confrontation. Finally he spoke. “Ah, last time I believe you got, ah, seventy percent or so.”
“Man, I didn’t get any seventy percent,” snapped the mayor. “You don’t know what the hell I got, do you? Do you?” The reporter’s silence infuriated Young. “Well, do you?” he almost shouted. The reporter shrugged.
“You don’t,” said Young. No matter how much he won, “they” were always trying to take it away. “The press tried to brainwash us in this election, and we refused to be brainwashed,” he snapped.
The assembled journalists stood there looking glum and confused. Coleman wasn’t their grumpy uncle; he was no kind of uncle at all. Even on the happiest night of his life, he was an angry black man and they were the paid representatives of the enemy. It would be a long four years.
A white television reporter gave it one more try. “Come on, Mr. Mayor,” she cajoled with a bright, girlish smile. “You know you really love us.”
Young regarded her in stony silence. “Well, kinda love us?” she pleaded in an uncertain voice.
The mayor stared for a long moment at the white lady begging for absolution. There was a lifetime in that pause, seventy-one years of humiliations, army stockades, unemployment, government harassment … and victory. Finally, in spite of himself, he laughed. “Kinda,” he said. “Yeah, kinda.”