The Cavanaugh administration epitomized the city’s glowing image. The mayor was considered one of the brightest young stars in America, a politician with the perfect Kennedy-era blend of old-fashioned blarny and state-of-the-art technocracy. In 1965, at a national mayors’ conference, he stunned his colleagues by unveiling a new system in which computers would constantly monitor developments on every block of the city, allowing experts to intervene at the first sign of economic or social dislocation.
The bubble burst on the twenty-third of July, 1967. A police raid on an after-hours club on Twelfth Street, in the heart of the black ghetto, erupted into rioting. Forty-three people were killed in the streets of Detroit—most of them blacks shot by police or National Guard. Whole neighborhoods were looted and torched. Cavanaugh’s computers could do nothing to restore order. When the cops and National Guard failed to end the insurrection, President Johnson sent in 4,700 troops from the elite 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. Twice before, in 1863 and 1943, federal forces had been dispatched to put down racial disturbances in Detroit; their 1967 deployment made Detroit the only U.S. city in history to be occupied three times by the American army.
The Detroit riot was the worst of fifty-nine racial disturbances across the country in 1967; indeed, in terms of property damage and lives lost it was the worst in the twentieth century, and its impact on the city was dramatic. For Sale signs sprung up in every white neighborhood, seemingly in front of every house. There had always been a lot of vacant land outside the city, and Detroit’s suburbs had been expanding slowly since the fifties; now developers threw up houses, schools and shopping malls beyond Eight Mile Road. Some people were so panicked that they spent the winter of 1967–68 sleeping on their relatives’ couches, or shivered in half-completed tract homes. The riot touched off an exodus that left Detroit with a black majority within five years.
It also broke the spirit of Jerry Cavanaugh, who had left office in 1966 and run, unsuccessfully, for the Senate. His computers and good intentions had been useless in understanding the passions and grievances of the ghetto, just as McNamara’s had proven worthless in deciphering the realities of Southeast Asia. In the mayoralty election of 1969, a moderate black candidate, Richard Austin, was narrowly defeated by Roman Gribbs, a former sheriff. But it was a last gasp; four years later, the now mostly black city elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young.
In the aftermath of the riot, Detroit became the national capital of disingenuous surprise. People suddenly discovered what should have been obvious—that beyond the glittering downtown, the leafy neighborhoods, the whirring computers, there was another city: poor, black and angry.
For years, Detroit’s growing black population had been dealt with through repression and neglect. The police department recruited southern cops who knew how to deal with Negroes; blacks took a risk just walking down Woodward Avenue. There was no place for their children on Santa’s knee at Hudson’s, which only employed light-skinned sales personnel (paper bag brown was the darkest permissible hue). Residential segregation and urban renewal, which plowed down the old Black Bottom ghetto without replacing it, caused extreme crowding. It was only through the smoke of burning buildings that these things became visible.
A committee, New Detroit, was established, ostensibly to “attack and overcome the root causes of racial and social disorder.” In fact, the committee, whose members included Detroit’s business and industrial leaders, produced the rhetorical cover that enabled many of them to get themselves and their businesses out of town. A few whites did invest in the city. Henry Ford II helped finance the Renaissance Center, a gleaming white elephant of offices and stores, along the river. Suburban multimillionaires Max Fisher and Alfred Taubman put money into high-priced condos on the riverfront. But most of the city’s merchants and financiers had no intention of leaving their money in Detroit, where any damn thing could touch off another riot. Besides, they argued, the money was already in the suburbs, and business is business.
Detroit’s shift from a prosperous white city to a poor black one was extraordinarily fast; within six years of the riot, it had a black majority and a black administration. And the change was far more complete than in other major American cities. Chicago maintained stable white ethnic neighborhoods and a vital business district; Washington, D.C., remained anchored by the federal government, which provided jobs; in Atlanta, mayors from the civil rights movement built economic and political alliances with white suburbia.
But in Detroit, events conspired to leave the city uniquely impoverished, abandoned and militant. The bottom fell out of the auto industry, causing mass unemployment. The abundance of land beyond the municipal boundaries enabled surburbanites to create an alternative downtown in the suburb of Southfield. And the new mayor, Coleman Young, elected in 1973, did not come from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was a militant former union man who consolidated power by adopting a confrontational policy toward the city’s suburban neighbors.
For the two and a half million whites who lived in America’s most segregated suburbs, Detroit became The Corner writ large—an alien, threatening wreck, a place to drive through, if at all, with the windows rolled up and the doors securely locked. Whites not only left the city physically, they abandoned it emotionally as well.
When I told suburban friends that I planned to live and work in Detroit they reacted with disbelief and alarm. Some suggested a bodyguard, others a pistol. Most, however, simply warned me that I would probably not survive six months as a white man in the Murder Capital of America.
I was not unaffected by their warnings. I had no Charles to vouch for me, and in the preceding twenty years I had lost whatever street smarts I once had. My first trips into the city were jumpy affairs, spent mostly looking out the window of my car; in a way, I was back in my parents’ Chevy, watching the action, afraid to come too close.
This was not simple paranoia—Detroit today is genuinely a fearsome-looking place. Many of its neighborhoods appear to be the victims of a sadistic aerial bombardment—houses burned and vacant, buildings twisted and crumbling, whole city blocks overrun with weeds and the carcasses of discarded automobiles. Shopping streets are depressing avenues—banks converted into Fundamentalist churches, party stores with bars and boards on their windows and, here and there, a barbecue joint or saloon. The decay is everywhere, but it is especially noticeable on the east side, which has lost roughly half its residents in the past thirty years—the most extreme depopulation of any urban area in America.
Worst of all is downtown. Several of the landmarks on Woodward Ave. remain, and in the past few years there have been several grandiose building projects, but they can’t obscure the fact that downtown Detroit is now pretty much empty. Hudson’s stands deserted, and there isn’t a single department store left in town. Entire skyscrapers—hotels, office buildings and apartment houses—are vacant and decaying.
During what should be rush hour, reporters from the Free Press play a macabre game, called King of the Corner. The object is to stand at a downtown intersection and look all four ways. If you can’t see a single human being in any direction, you are King of the Corner. Every morning anoints its own royalty. Detroit, America’s sixth largest city, is the only metropolis in the country where you can walk a downtown block during business hours without passing a living soul.
Suburban whites are dismayed by the physical degeneration of what was once their city, but they are truly terrified by its racial composition and the physical threat they associate with blacks, who constitute between 70 and 80 percent of the population. Some whites, mostly elderly, still live in the extremities of the city, and municipal employees are required to reside there by law (although a good many have fictitious addresses). But in most parts of town, most of the time, Detroit is as black as Nairobi.
The white abandonment of Detroit, coupled with the collapse of the auto economy, has left the city with a diminished tax base and a set of horrific social problems. Among the
nation’s major cities, Detroit was at or near the top in unemployment, per capita poverty, and infant mortality throughout the eighties.
The city is an impoverished island surrounded by prosperous suburbs, and almost nothing connects them. The Detroit area has virtually no mass transport, due mainly to the unwillingness of suburbanites to make their communities accessible to blacks. A few cultural institutions, such as the symphony and the art museum, have remained in town, but they are patronized mostly by whites. So are the Detroit Tigers and Red Wings (the Pistons and Lions play in the suburbs). Detroit and its satellite towns share a water system, two newspapers, and broadcasting facilities. The place where black and white Detroit come most intimately together is on the airwaves, where radio talk shows offer a steady diet of racially loaded charge and countercharge.
Most of all, the city and suburbs are separated by a cultural and emotional gap as wide as any that divides hostile nations. The suburbs purr with the contented sounds of post-Reagan America while the city teeters on the brink of separatism and seethes with the resentments of postcolonial Africa.
Twenty years in the Middle East had given me a good eye for tribal animosity, and in Detroit, even during my first days there, I recognized it. Strangely, it didn’t seem personal. The local disposition is mild, even friendly. A great many people, black and white, were born in the South, and it shows in their manners. Strangers nod to one another on the street and make small talk in elevators. Standing next to one another at public urinals, men smile and say “How y’doin?” Black and white Detroiters rarely meet, but when they do—at work, in suburban shopping malls or at other neutral sites—it is not at all unusual for them to get along amicably.
In fact, the tribal rivalries, fears and hatred in Detroit tend to be collective and abstract. Each side has an orthodox, almost ritual explanation for what has happened to the city they once shared and no longer do, and, not surprisingly, each side blames the other.
Shortly after coming to the city I was introduced to Tom De Lisle, an engaging man in his early forties who grew up in Detroit and, in the seventies, served as spokesman for the city’s last white mayor, Roman Gribbs. Although he now lives in the suburbs, he still works in town, as a producer for WDIV, the NBC television affiliate. It was from him that I first heard the white version of what went wrong.
“This is the place where the wheels came off the wagon of Western civilization,” he told me in a voice that mixed sadness with anger. “This town has become unlivable. What I want to know is, where’s the outrage? There is no outrage here. This is a town that is down for the count—and maybe already being carried out of the ring. You’d think there would be an outcry, or at least some sympathy for the victim. Detroit is as helpless and hopeless a place as any in America.
“Believe me, this town is a goddamned disaster area; it just exists from day to day. I’ve lived in New York and L.A., but the difference is that here, there’s no way to get out. Detroit is one big prison with Eight Mile as the gate.”
Tom De Lisle is not unaware of the conditions that brought the city to its present state. “It was never easy to be a black in Detroit,” he conceded. “Blacks felt—rightly—victimized. There were always racist cops. But the riot never stopped in Detroit. Both the criminals and the cops understood that it was a whole new ball game. In the seventies, it was like a gang war between the blacks and the cops—and the blacks won.”
The flight to the suburbs—by both whites and middle-class blacks—was, in De Lisle’s view, a simple desire to escape the endemic violence of the city. “In metropolitan Detroit today, fear is the most pervasive single factor,” he said. “When I worked for the mayor, almost every member of his staff suffered a major crime. One night someone pumped three shots through my window for no reason. One of the mayor’s secretaries was brutally raped. In the City-County Building. During working hours.
“My grandparents lived on East Grand Boulevard,” he continued. “Somebody stole their air conditioner right out of the wall. My grandmother used to look out the back window to tell my grandfather when it was safe to get his car out of the garage. There are thousands of stories like that. And when people report them to the cops, the cops say ‘Move.’
“Everything goes back to the racial situation. Detroit has been the first major American city to cope with going from white to black. And whites left. That’s the American way—people have a right to move in, or move out. There’s evidence to point out that white people who moved had something to fear. Who wants to put their kids in a situation where they are likely to be crime victims? That’s as basic as life gets.
“If I were mayor, I’d declare Detroit a disaster area,” he said. “It desperately needs national assistance. But Coleman Young has no compassion. He says, ‘Things have never been better.’ What a goddamned lie! The bottom line is, Detroit is an orphaned city. There’s no sense that anyone cares. What’s happening here is the death of a city.”
In the following months I heard this view repeated a hundred times. It is a constant refrain—blacks, especially black violence, drove people out of their homes and their city. This is the white way to look at it; but Arthur Johnson reminded me that there is another perspective as well.
Johnson, president of the Detroit chapter of the NAACP and a vice-president of Wayne State University, is a scholarly-looking man with thick glasses and a white beard. He leads an organization that for many years symbolized moderation and interracial cooperation. But when we met in his office on the campus of Wayne State, he sounded anything but moderate on the subject of his white neighbors.
“Blacks in Atlanta feel their city is loved,” he said. “Here, white people are proud to say, ‘I haven’t been downtown in ten years.’ We know we’re not loved. We know our city has been scarred by the media on an unprecedented scale. I attribute this to the fact that we have a black majority and black leadership. Detroit has unjustly come to represent the worst in America. If they make that stick, it’s possible to justify our neglect and separation.”
Johnson, who serves as one of Detroit’s four police commissioners, is not naive about the city’s problems. But in his view, they spring not from black incompetence, or violence, but from white hostility.
“Whites don’t know a goddamned thing about what’s gone wrong here. They say, ‘Detroit had this, Detroit had that.… But economic power is still in the hands of whites. It’s apartheid. They rape the city, and then they come and say, ‘Look what these niggers did to the city,’ as if they were guiltless. Then they go out and vote for Ronald Reagan. I look at white working-class people talking about taxes are too high and I don’t know them. I just don’t know them at all.”
De Lisle spoke about the death of a city; but to Arthur Johnson and the rest of Detroit’s black intelligentsia, something is being born in Detroit—a new, black metropolis.
“Detroit has helped nurture a new black mentality,” Johnson said, pounding his desk for emphasis. “More than any other city, blacks here make an issue of where you live. If you’re with us, you’ll find a place in the city.”
Whites often say, in their own defense, that many middle-class blacks also leave the city at the first opportunity. I mentioned this to Johnson, but he waved it away. “The majority of the black middle class is here. We are engaged in the most determined, feverish effort to save Detroit. Why? Because Detroit is special. It’s the first major city in the United States to have taken on the symbols of a black city. It has elected a strong, powerful black mayor, powerful in both his personality and his office. Detroit, more than anywhere else, has gathered power and put it in black hands.”
My own instincts and experience told me that each man was, in his own way, right. It was hard to deny the harsh portrait of the city painted by Tom De Lisle. Judged by the standards of the white middle class, Detroit is an urban nightmare, a place that offers neither safety nor prosperity to its citizens. The American part of me sympathized with this view; after all, my own grandfather was mu
rdered there, and my relatives moved to the suburbs.
At the same time, I was intrigued by Arthur Johnson’s concept of Detroit as a developing black polis in the American heartland. He sees it as more than simply another city; it is, to him, an island of black self-determination in a sea of white racism and hostility.
My Israeli side responded to this notion. Israel, like Detroit, is a place where people with a history of persecution and dependence finally gave up on the dream of assimilation, and chose to try, for the first time, to rule themselves. Both are rough, somewhat crude places; both feel embattled and rejected (Detroit by whites, Israel by American Jews who have remained in the United States); and both have learned hard lessons about the limitations of going it alone.
From time to time, American friends, looking at the hard economic conditions and precarious security of Israel, have asked me why I would choose to live there. The answer is simple enough: Israel, for all its faults, is home. It is a place governed by people like me, a place where I feel secure and self-assured about being a Jew. It may not be much by the standards of Scarsdale or West Bloomfield, but it’s all mine.
Talking to Arthur Johnson, it occurred to me for the first time that this is what Detroit represents for blacks. I was fascinated by the parallel, and challenged (as he meant me to be) by his assertion that white people don’t know a goddamned thing about Detroit. “Don’t believe what you read in the papers,” he told me. “If you want to know what this city is all about, go out and see it for yourself.”
Chapter Two
COWBOYS AND INDIANS
What you read in the papers about Detroit is not inviting. The two dailies, the News and the Free Press, relentlessly chronicle the events in America’s most violent city. Shortly after I arrived in town, they published the FBI’s crime statistics for 1987, a compilation that showed Detroit once again leading the nation’s major cities in homicide.
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