Nothin' but Blue Skies

by Edward McClelland

  Hawkins’s connection to the killings was even more personal: two of his sons had been shot to death in drug-related murders. In Flint, though, that didn’t make him unusual, or even unlucky. Everybody knew somebody who’d been murdered. Hawkins had always preached against the street life, but after his sons died, he became a warrior against violence.

  “It was one of those things where you are on a battlefield trying to fight for others and you become a victim of it yourself,” he said. “It appeared that could have been one of those things that I said, ‘You know, this hit home too much for me. I’m going to back off.’ Well, that wasn’t the case. It hit for me where I said, ‘I am going to become really aggressive now to make a greater change than ever before.’”

  Edwards tried to compete with the gangs by holding Friday Family Nights at his church, with Bible Bowl and Twister. He took his young parishioners bowling and invited them to fish in the stocked pond behind his house. He offered job counseling and drug counseling. But as prominent as he was in his community—a pastor is like an African-American rabbi, responsible for the temporal and the spiritual uplift of his people—he could not put a preacher at every kitchen table, to paraphrase the mayor. And like the mayor, he believed that was where the violence in Flint began.

  “My belief primarily is the lack of concern from the parents,” he said. “I made this statement Sunday in church. You know Ray Ray and Pookie don’t have a job—why do you keep letting them bring these twenty-four-to-forty-two-inch flat-screen TVs in here? Why do you let them drive around with a car with four thousand dollars in tires and wheels, and don’t ask where he got it from? They don’t care where it’s coming from, but as soon as that child gets picked up … I told them yesterday, if your child gets caught up in this stuff and he refuses to take the deal that’s being offered, don’t come and get me to come and get him when he’s getting arrested, because I am not going down there.”

  A few days later, I attended a CeaseFire meeting in the gymnasium of one of Flint’s largest Baptist churches. The purpose was to announce the “scared straight” plan to the community. The chief of police was there. Mayor Walling was there.

  On my way out of the meeting, I ran into one of the pastors I met at the CeaseFire office in the parking lot. He was dressed in a Sunday preaching suit. I told him I’d just met a woman who bought a gun after her house was broken into.

  “Shoot,” he said, patting the breast of his coat. “I’ve got a concealed weapons permit.”

  “You’ve got a gun?”

  The pastor snorted. “Not on me,” he said. “But I’m not going to be a victim.”

  If the preachers were armed, then who in Flint didn’t have a gun?

  DAYNE WALLING WAS A RHODES SCHOLAR who had returned home to Flint at age thirty-two and been elected mayor three years later, because what else is there for a Rhodes scholar to do in Flint? Although he was pale, bulbous and graying at the temples, he still looked like a young man, in a blue suit whose sleeves overlapped his shirt cuffs.

  Flint, the first American city with a black mayor, and the first to pass an open-housing ordinance by popular vote, was just as likely to elect a white mayor as a black one, and just as likely to throw him out when he couldn’t reverse the murder rate or bring back the jobs General Motors had spirited away. Walling was finishing the term of Don Williamson, a car dealer who resigned rather than face a recall election when it was discovered the city had an $8.3 million deficit, not the $4 million surplus he’d claimed. Williamson would not have been the first Flint mayor kicked out because he failed to balance the budget. Woodrow Stanley—Flint’s third black mayor—was recalled because of financial mismanagement: he missed federal grant deadlines and failed to cut a deficit which grew to $30 million after Buick City closed. In the previous decade, city hall had been occupied by four elected mayors, two interim mayors, and an emergency financial manager appointed by the governor to balance the city’s budget. Running Flint requires the financial acumen of William Pitt the Younger, the law-and-order bullying of Benito Mussolini, the city-building vision of Romulus, the labor negotiating skills of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the industrial efficiency of Otto von Bismarck. Obviously, no politician has all these qualities. Any politician who had even one probably wouldn’t settle for mayor of a bankrupt city of one hundred thousand and counting backward. Flint is ungovernable, yet Flintstones continually punish mayors who can’t govern it.

  (The Rust Belt is a cradle of boy politicians too callow to win in more orderly cities. In Youngstown, after Congressman James Traficant was expelled from the House and imprisoned for bribery, racketeering, and tax evasion, he was succeeded by a twenty-nine-year-old staffer, Tim Ryan. Youngstown’s voters threw out Traficant’s generation of mobbed-up leadership and elected a 34-year-old mayor, Jay Williams. The president of Youngstown State University’s board of trustees was also in his 30s.

  “There was kind of a reboot,” one Youngstowner commented. “There definitely is a youth movement here.”

  There’s a youth movement all over the Rust Belt. It’s far easier for an ambitious Generation Xer or Millenial to achieve civic prominence in Flint, Youngstown, Buffalo or Pittsburgh than in New York, Chicago or Washington, D.C.)

  In his campaign for a full term as Flint’s mayor, Dayne Walling had six opponents. When you’re in charge of the nation’s murder capital, you can’t expect to return to office by acclamation. The field was seated together at an NAACP mayoral forum in the spacious wedding reception hall of a North End Baptist church. The seven men were a perfect reflection of Flint’s demographics, as though selected to fill a quota. Three whites, three blacks, one Korean. Furthermore, race didn’t seem to be an issue. Earlier that day, I’d stopped at Mayor Walling’s campaign office to pick up a stock of glossy brochures: every volunteer was black. Flint couldn’t afford to vote along racial lines because it was looking for only one quality in a leader: protection from murderers, arsonists, rapists, and burglars. Tribalism was too far up the hierarchy of needs. Walling’s best-funded rival, a white developer who had moved in from the suburbs to campaign for mayor, parked an old state police car in front of his campaign headquarters. Inside, I met a volunteer who’d gotten involved in politics after his brother was shot to death during a robbery. He’d bought a house in Flint—“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he said, incredulous at the figure; “it was way overpriced”—and might have run for mayor himself, if he hadn’t blown so much money on real estate.

  “They still haven’t caught the guy who killed my brother,” the man said. “There were two witnesses, and they haven’t arrested anybody.”

  The debate began before the mayor even arrived. A black man stormed through the aisles between folding tables, chanting, “Walling sucks! Walling sucks!” He was guided to a seat, where he was told to shut up and allow the candidates to give their own versions of why Walling sucked.

  “Every municipality in the state had a chance to vote on whether they wanted their public safety cut,” said a white candidate named David Davenport. “It’s sad that we had to lose ninety lives because somebody decided to take away your democratic right. You say we’re number one in homicides? What do you expect when you come in and lay off fifty-six officers in a city that’s number three?”

  Then a black candidate—Darryl Buchanan, a former city council president—picked up the attack on Walling.

  “His administration allowed a serial killer to roam free for a hundred and ten days,” Buchanan said. “His actions showed he didn’t care about the North End.”

  In the spring of 2010, an Israeli Arab named Elias Abuelazam began approaching old, weak-looking black men on the streets of Flint. He asked for directions or help with his car—and then stabbed them. In Flint, murders of black men are a weekly occurrence, so Abuelazam killed five and slashed eight more before the police realized there was a pattern to his attacks. That may have been why he chose black men as his victims and Flint as his hunting ground. Had Abuelazam stabbe
d young white women in the Washington, D.C., suburbs—where he lived before moving to Michigan and beginning his spree—his crimes would have been profiled on Nancy Grace after victim number two. Because murder was so common, it was allowed to become even more common. Abuelazam, who contributed to Flint’s record-breaking homicide total, was arrested while trying to board a plane to Israel and is now serving a life sentence in a Michigan prison. Before the killer was caught, Reginald Kaigler filmed a vlog post in which he declared, “I’m going to be more cautious. It sort of reminds me one of the reasons why we should be able to carry our weapons openly.”

  In defense of his leadership, Walling hearkened back to a humiliating episode in Flint history. In 2002, after Mayor Stanley was recalled, Flint was placed under the control of an emergency financial manager, who had the power to make spending decisions without consulting the mayor or the city council. With another Republican governor in office, there was talk a state takeover could happen again.

  “You’ve seen what’s happened to this community when the spending goes wrong and we lose control of our entire community and the democratic process,” the mayor said. “That’s not going to happen while I’m your mayor. We’re going to reduce the deficit and we’re going to have the biggest public safety force we can afford.”

  Just as there had been a racial subtext to the accusation that Walling allowed a serial killer to run loose because he didn’t care about the (mostly black) North End, there was a racial subtext to this boast. Emergency managers had mainly been appointed to replace governments with black leaders: Pontiac, Inkster, Benton Harbor, the Detroit public schools, and Highland Park. The white governor in Lansing wouldn’t do that to a white boy. Between Oxford University and Flint, Walling had worked as a grant writer in the Washington, D.C., mayor’s office. Only he knew how to go outside the community for help. Just that month, he’d brought Labor Secretary Hilda Solis to Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy, the drug dispensary in the old Fisher One, where she announced the appointment of Youngstown, Ohio, mayor Jay Williams as director of the Office of Recovery for Auto Communities and Workers. (Talking about the plant where the Volt was built, Solis made a very creditable effort to pronounce Hamtramck. “Hamtrack” isn’t bad for a California girl.)

  “There’s sixty firefighters and police officers who would not be able to come to work for our community if it weren’t for my administration going to the foundations, going to the federal government for grants, and getting these investors in our community,” Walling said. “The state is investing in the city of Flint right now. The Michigan State Police invested in our county jail to free up space that we haven’t been able to pay for in our community. If incompetent leadership comes back in, our community’s only recourse is to hope and pray that somehow that administration can win a case in front of the Supreme Court.”

  The people of Flint bought it: in November, Walling was returned to office with 56 percent of the vote. Less than a month later, Governor Rick Snyder appointed an emergency manager, with dictatorial powers to eliminate Flint’s $7 million deficit. Flint became a ward of the state. Walling was mayor in name only, with 60 percent of his old salary and a seat on the manager’s advisory council. The city council was allowed to meet once a month, to review items on the Manager’s agenda.

  The emergency manager law was written to rescue cities from corrupt or incompetent mayors. Walling, a cross between a Webelo and a West Wing policy wonk, was not corrupt. Nor was he incompetent. It would have been impossible to balance the budget of a city that’s lost half its people and over 90 percent of its middle-class jobs without making it look even more like the set of Escape from Flint. If a city is too poor to afford democracy, it’s not a city anymore.

  16.

  “This Is Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile”

  David Hollister had been mayor of Lansing for less than a year when General Motors’s vice president for local governments walked into his office on the ninth floor of city hall. The office overlooked the Michigan state capitol, a snow-globe version of the original in Washington. Hollister had spent twenty years in that capitol, as a Democratic state legislator. State government was one leg of the stool that supported his city’s economy. The second leg was Hollister’s alma mater, Michigan State University. The third, and the strongest, was Oldsmobile. At one time, Oldsmobile had employed twenty-five thousand workers in Lansing, including Hollister’s father, a high school dropout who had hired in as an assembler and worked his way up to tool-and-die maker. According to the WPA’s Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State, Lansing’s trinity of employers meant that “the political activity of a state capital, the rumbling tempo of an industrial city, and the even temper of a family community are curiously blended.” In postclassical language, this had been abbreviated to “the Three C’s: Capital, Campus, Cars.”

  Oldsmobile’s identity, however, was no longer inseparable from Lansing. The Oldsmobile sign, which once glowed above the Grand River in grapefruit neon, had been taken down in 1985, when GM reorganized itself into two divisions. The guys on the line didn’t work at Olds anymore, they worked at B-O-C. Officially, that stood for Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac. Gripers called it Big Old Cars, or the Big Operation of Corruption. To strip Oldsmobile of all independence from the parent company, the engineers and executives had been transferred from Oldsmobile’s boxy administration building to GM headquarters in Detroit. But General Motors still operated three auto plants in Lansing, and it was those plants the vice president had come to talk to Hollister about.

  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” the executive said.

  “What’s the good news?” the mayor asked.

  “Well,” the vice president answered, “we are going to be celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the Oldsmobile, and we are going to have a yearlong celebration, and it’s going to be culminated with a week celebration here in Lansing. We are going to be launching three new cars—the Aurora, the Intrigue, and the Alero. These are centennial cars. And the good news is the Alero will be made in Lansing. It will bring work to the assembly plants.”

  (Oldsmobile, founded in 1897 by Lansing’s Ransom Eli Olds, was, true to its name, the oldest American auto nameplate.)

  “Well, this is all very good news,” Hollister said. “What’s the bad news?”

  “The life cycle of the centennial cars is about five years, and at the end of the five-year run, we are going to close the Lansing facilities.”

  Hollister felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. GM was going to throw Lansing a party and then preside over its funeral, for the same reason: it had been building cars there for nearly a century. Lansing’s auto plants were obsolete. Olds Main, the plant on the river, dated back to 1901, when the state granted R. E. Olds the fifty-acre Michigan Central Fairgrounds, including the horse-racing track, on which he tested cars. The Fisher Body plant had been purchased from bankrupt Durant Motors in 1935. The painted, trimmed bodies were shipped across town to the assembly line in the Main plant, an inefficient arrangement that crowded the one-way streets of Lansing with sighing diesel trucks and cost General Motors $20 million a year.

  No American auto company had built a new plant north of the Mason-Dixon line in over a dozen years, since Detroit flattened Poletown. Having used up Lansing, GM was going to move on to a Southern state with more open land and lower labor costs, leaving behind hundreds of acres of polluted real estate. Same game the company ran on Flint. Losing three auto plants wouldn’t turn Lansing into a setting for Life After People, because it was not as dependent on building cars as Flint. But Lansing would be a poorer city, and it would no longer be a city that made things. As the twenty-first century approached, Hollister hoped to turn Lansing into an advanced manufacturing center. That would require both the brains of professors and the hands of skilled tradesmen.

  There was another difference between Lansing and Flint: Lansing didn’t have the history of labor trouble that had caused GM to walk away from the V
ehicle City. In 1937, a month after the Flint Sit-Down Strike, workers at Reo Motors staged their own sit-down, but that strike did not leave behind the same screw-the-foreman legacy. Lansing was not a purely blue-collar town, which leavened class conflict. But Lansing’s autoworkers also descended from different stock than Flint’s. Flint’s auto plants began booming in the 1920s, after nativist Republicans in Congress halted immigration from Europe. So the Buick was forced to recruit unlettered sharecroppers from the South. Lansing’s autoworkers were more likely to be Yankees or German Catholics, two groups more devoted to hard work and education. Modern yeomen, they worked a full shift in the plant, then spent another eight hours tending their farms.

  “That many entering the first auto plants in Lansing came primarily from native-born, rural backgrounds affected management and working-class culture in the early factories,” wrote Lisa M. Fine in The Story of Reo Joe, a study that explains why Lansing’s autoworkers were never attracted to radical labor movements. “The farmers’ conservative and capitalistic values account for the relative tranquility of the hinterland … Both the prosperity on the land and the personnel from the land created the conditions for the start of the automobile industry in Lansing.”

  Even today, Lansing autoworkers disdain the antagonism of their Flint brethren. A tool-and-die maker who transferred from Oldsmobile to Flint is convinced GM decided to close his new plant when one of the workers mooned executives making an on-site visit.

  “God bless them,” said a former president of a Lansing UAW local, “but they have a legacy of being more militant. We have a legacy of getting along.”

  “I couldn’t believe the difference that sixty-five miles made,” said a cost estimator who was transferred from Olds to Buick. “Oldsmobile was always spic-and-span. When I moved to Buick, it was a pigpen. They were stepping over pallets and defective parts.”