Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  This is the predominant suburban feeling—that whites are the victims, not the perpetrators, of racism. People like Brooks Patterson, who was born and raised in Detroit, view themselves as innocent refugees and regard their native city with a mixture of contempt and anger. They do not accept the notion that Detroit is still the big city; to them, it is an irrelevancy.

  “Coleman calls the suburbs ‘cornfields,’ ” Patterson said angrily. “But in fact, in no sense are we dependent on Detroit. They are dependent on us. The truth is, Detroit has had its day. I don’t give a damn about Detroit. It has no direct bearing on the quality of my life. If I never crossed Eight Mile again I wouldn’t be bereft of anything.”

  “What about the quality of life for Detroiters?” I wondered. Patterson looked at me as if I were simpleminded. “It’s like the Indians on the reservation,” he said. “Those who can will leave Detroit. Those who can’t will get blankets and food from the government men in the city.”

  Brooks Patterson sees the post-Coleman era as a time of potential rapprochement between the cornfield and the battlefield. “But they’ve got to see that crime is the bottom line,” said the prosecutor of Oakland County. “They have to kick ass and take names. Without getting crime under control you have no solution. All the city’s problems have their origin in a lack of safety.”

  “And until they do?”

  Patterson smiled bleakly and rubbed his hands together. “Until they do, you move to the suburbs and defend yourself,” he said.

  Moving to the suburbs isn’t so simple though, even for blacks who want to. Open housing statutes make it legally impossible to select your neighbors and make sure they stay selected, but there are ways. Detroit’s suburbs did not get to be the most segregated in the country by accident.

  A generation ago, residential separation was simpler. When I was growing up in Detroit, Grosse Pointe had a “point system” to keep out undesirables. Prospective buyers were rated by skin color, accent, religion and other criteria, including a “typically American way of life.” Under the system, blacks, Mexicans and Orientals were automatically given a failing grade, as were virtually all Jews and southern Europeans.

  In Dearborn, the seat of the Ford empire, racism was less scientific, but equally virulent. Mayor Orville Hubbard, a vocal segregationist, was kept in office for more than thirty years by an admiring populace composed of ethnic Italians, Poles and southern whites, who subscribed to his antiblack attitude. “I just don’t believe in integration,” he said in 1967. “When that happens, along comes socializing with the whites, intermarriage and then mongrelization.”

  This sort of blatant race-baiting has all but disappeared from the public discourse of metropolitan Detroit. The fact is, civil rights legislation and black political activism have chipped away at many of the institutionalized forms of overt racism. In the summer of 1988, for example, Dearborn was forced to accept its first black police recruit. A smattering of blacks now live there and in Detroit’s other working-class suburbs. Even Grosse Pointe has a handful of wealthy black residents.

  The main obstacles to integration are economic and social. Realtors say that there is no place in the Detroit area today where a black can’t buy a home, but the cost is often prohibitive. The most modest white neighborhoods in the suburbs are more than twice as expensive as comparable areas in the city—precisely because they are white. And those blacks who can afford to move often feel unwelcome.

  Nowhere is this truer than in Warren, a small city just to the north of Detroit, inhabited largely by Poles and Italians. Twenty years ago, a mixed couple tried to move in, and police had to be called to protect them from outraged mobs. A few years later, the city fathers turned down badly needed HUD money because it meant building integrated housing. The only important black institution there is the Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery, the Metro area’s largest black burial grounds, and most Warrenites want to keep it that way.

  “The attitude isn’t as much racist as one of fear,” said Richard Sabaugh, a county commissioner and public relations executive who as a Warren city councilman helped lead the HUD fight. “People don’t see every black as bad. But the image of Detroit is of a decaying, crime-ridden city headed by a mayor who makes racist remarks. We view the values of people in Detroit as completely foreign. To us it’s like a foreign country and culture. The language is different and the way people think there is different. We just want to live in peace. And we feel that anybody coming from Detroit is going to cause problems.”

  Sabaugh, who ran unopposed in his last contest, faithfully mirrors the views of many of his constituents. “It’s all one complex—blacks, Coleman Young, crime, drugs, Detroit. People feel they’ve been driven out once, and it could occur again.”

  Considering the conditions in the city, I wondered if anyone felt compassion for its residents. Sabaugh seemed amazed at the notion.

  “Any sentiment to help Detroiters? Not at all. I’ve never heard that. If you ever asked to raise taxes to help Detroit, it would go down fifteen to one. Guilt to help people who won’t help themselves? That’s a thought that’s not even tolerated. If they saw a young kid in a destitute situation, there might be some compassion. But otherwise, no. There is no feeling of pity for Detroit in the suburbs. Maybe the bottom line is they’ve given up on Detroit. You want to hear what people think, the best place is the senior citizen picnic. Most of those people used to live in the city. Ask them how they feel about Detroit,” Sabaugh suggested.

  The Warren perspective was on display at the annual outing, held in a wood pavilion in one of the city’s verdant parks. The seniors were bland, mild-eyed veterans of the auto factories and their equally bland wives. The men wore polyester sportsclothes, the ladies sported Lurleen Wallace bouffants. They played cards at long wooden tables, or lined up for free eye examinations and blood pressure checks at booths along the sides. Mayor Ronald Bonkowski moved among the old people shaking hands and exchanging family gossip. Among the thousand or so picnickers, there wasn’t a single black.

  At a table in the center of the room, two old men, who turned out to be brothers, sat in stoic silence while their wives chatted happily. They were glad to divert themselves by talking about their old hometown.

  “It’s a war zone across Eight Mile rode,” said one, a grizzled former toolmaker named Steve. “They should put up a big wall, like in Berlin. I’m afraid to go back there—it’s like going into some Russian-held city. You don’t know if you’re coming back alive.” The women, who had fallen silent, nodded in agreement, but Joseph, Steve’s brother, shook his head.

  “I’m an old union man,” he said, “and one thing I learned is that you have to get along with blacks. It’s worse to be a bigot than a black. It’s against the law to be a bigot, and it’s not against the law to be black. I think we’re better off in this country because we got blacks, Chinese, Japanese …”

  Steve cut him off impatiently. “What’s wrong with the colored? I’ll tell you what’s wrong. No one ever taught them how to live. They destroy their own houses. They should live in a tent, like a Boy Scout, until they learn to live in a house. They can’t get it into their head that a house should last more than five years.”

  “Well, I built a house on Waldo, and it’s still there, paying taxes,” said Joseph.

  “Yeah, well maybe you should go back there and live with them,” said Steve, and the women giggled at the absurdity of the suggestion.

  “I don’t mind living next to them,” said Joseph. “In time, people will recognize that the black fella is just like them.”

  “Maybe they’re just like you, but they sure as hell ain’t just like me,” said Steve. “And I don’t want any out here in Warren. You want to live with ’em, go right ahead. You know what you are?” He hesitated before continuing; this was his brother, after all. But anger overcame family sentiment. “I hate to say it, Joseph, but you’re nothing but a damn liberal.”

  Twenty-five years ago, Detroit prided itself
on being in the vanguard of American liberalism; today, the term has become an epithet. One of the few places where it is still respectable, if not exactly fashionable, is Southfield, often considered to be the “Jewish” suburb just north of Detroit.

  When I left for Israel in the summer of 1967, the majority of Detroit’s eighty thousand Jews were clustered in the northwest corner of the city. Dozens of synagogues, religious schools, community centers and delis dotted the areas’s main commercial avenues, and families lived in spacious brick homes built along quiet, tree-lined streets. But the riot touched off a mass exodus; six months later, when I came home for a visit, I literally didn’t recognize the place. Not a single one of my friends’ families was still there.

  Most of them had moved to Southfield or even farther north, to the WASP suburbs of Birmingham and West Bloomfield. Only a few years before Jews felt unwelcome in such places, but in the racially charged atmosphere they now had the primary qualification for acceptance: if blacks considered Jews “almost white,” WASPs seemed to feel that they were “white enough.” Seemingly overnight, synagogues and day schools sprouted in the cornfields of suburbia, while, in northwest Detroit, abandoned temples became AME churches and pastrami parlors were transformed into barbecue joints.

  In the eighties, Southfield became the new downtown of white Detroit. Glittering gold-painted business towers and massive shopping centers tipped the commercial balance away from the city. In the fall of 1988, there were 23 million square feet of office space in Southfield and another 1.5 million were under construction—more than in the entire city of Detroit, whose population is ten times larger.

  For three generations, blacks have followed Jews northward, and the pattern is now being repeated in Southfield. In 1970, there were less than one hundred blacks in the town. By 1980, the number had grown to about eight thousand. Today, the city administration estimates that there are twenty thousand—about 20 percent of the population—making Southfield the most integrated city in the area.

  Ironically, it is also the least popular with Detroiters. They see it as their primary competition for the black middle class and many regard the black yuppies who live there as defectors. Moreover, the huge Northland shopping center, whose stores are white-owned and patronized largely by blacks, has become a symbol of suburban commercial exploitation. It is a mark of social consciousness not to shop there. Arthur Johnson told me proudly that he hasn’t bought more than a pair of shoes north of Eight Mile Road in years. Federal circuit judge Damon Keith, who lives in Detroit and whose court is in Cincinnati, prefers to shop in Ohio rather than drive a mile or two to Northland.

  This antipathy has little to do with the Jews; Detroit has been remarkably free of the acrimony that has often characterized black-Jewish relations in Chicago and New York. Partly this is because Arab store owners in the city have become the main focus of black resentment; partly because the Jewish community, especially its leader, multimillionaire Max Fisher, has been active in supporting Detroit projects. And a good deal of credit goes to Coleman Young, who is something of a philo-Semite.

  During the 1940s and 50s, when Young was involved in radical union politics, many of his associates were Jews who supported him in battles with the UAW establishment. In office, he has reciprocated by appointing several to key city positions. From them Young learned to appreciate Jewish cooking and Jewish humor. Throughout his incumbency, he has gone out of his way to encourage Jews—even those who now live in the suburbs—to remain involved in the life of the city.

  There is, in fact, more intimacy and complexity in the Jewish-black relationship than in any other. “We were always closer to Jews than to the others,” said Arthur Johnson, “and we miss them more.” Indeed, for generations, Jews were the only community willing to sell homes to blacks, and to contemplate living next to them. But each time, as poor blacks arrived in the wake of the middle class, contemplation gave way to flight.

  The cost of these repeated exoduses—in new homes, synagogues and institutions—has been crippling. This time, the Jewish community is trying to make a stand. Its Federation offers grants to young Jewish couples who buy homes in Southfield and neighboring Oak Park. “It’s not so much that Jews still believe in integration,” a Federation activist said. “We just don’t want to run again.”

  Southfield officials are extremely concerned that the efforts to maintain a stable white population will fail. “The media say that we will be a throw-away city in ten to twenty years,” said Southfield mayor Donald Fracassi. “I’m frightened, I admit it. But I’m not about to let the city fall without a fight. We understand the cost of a city becoming all black, and we’re ready to take on the threat of resegregation. If we lose, at least they’ll have to say we tried.”

  The Southfield strategy is based on another irony—the only important city in the Metro area that has declared integration to be a policy goal wants to maintain it by recuiting whites and steering blacks away. “Our approach to racial problems is unorthodox,” admitted city manager Robert Block. “Since we’re naturally attractive to blacks because of our quality of life and the fact that they feel welcome here, our target market is the white community.”

  The man in charge of implementing this strategy is Nimrod Rosenthal, a transplanted Israeli who chain-smokes Winstons and mixes business jargon with liberal platitudes in fast, Hebrew-accented English. He was hired to use the expertise he acquired as a marketing whiz for the Hudson’s Department Store chain to help sell the city to white people.

  Part of Rosenthal’s plan is based on the Shaker Heights model. The Cleveland suburb has fought resegregation by actively directing urban blacks to other suburbs, and Nimrod Rosenthal admitted that Southfield is considering doing the same. The idea is to set up a nonprofit office in Detroit that would help those who want to leave find housing elsewhere in Oakland County. In late 1988, the notion was still under discussion, and Southfield made little effort to publicize it; it is not the kind of program likely to be popular among its less liberal neighbors. Its officials were unmoved, however, by possible negative reactions. “They can’t hurt us,” said one. “Fair housing is the law of the land.”

  Southfield’s leaders were counting on blacks to go along. “The minorities here understand that if we can’t maintain a racial balance, they will be the losers,” said the mayor. “Their kids will go to poor schools and live in filthy neighborhoods. So the minorities will have to get out of the comfort zone, and move to other suburbs.”

  If the Shaker Heights plan represents push, Southfield has also mounted an impressive advertising campaign to pull in young whites. Its centerpiece is a series of thirty-second television spots that Nimrod Rosenthal screened for me on his office VCR.

  The ads depict aspects of life in Southfield—young couples dining in fine restaurants, relaxed businessmen able to drive to their offices within minutes, happy children frolicking in a safe schoolyard, youthful families walking hand in hand across well-tended lawns with brick ranch houses in the background. After watching half a dozen of the commercials it became clear that they had a common denominator—the only blacks visible were little girls and light-skinned women.

  When I pointed this out, Rosenthal seemed a bit defensive. He continued to run the ads, and after a few minutes he shouted, “Hey, there’s a black guy,” in an excited tone. He rewound the tape and played it over, so I could see a fleeting frame of young black executive sitting in a plush office.

  On and on went the commericals. Handsome yuppies playing tennis, shopping, clinking glasses of shining crystal, all against a background of glossy neo-rock. No one who saw the ads could possibly have guessed that nearly half the students in the Southfield schools are black, or that elderly people make up a large part of the city’s population, or that there are more than twenty thousand blacks (not to mention ten thousand Chaldeans and Arabs) already living in the suburb.

  “I have to overcome the perception of what whites think of as an integrated city,” Rosenthal ex
plained. “People are interested in quality of life.” This, of course, means a quantity of whites. Southfield’s marketing director has a product to sell—and who can blame him if he doesn’t want to hurt sales by giving prospective buyers the idea that there are blacks living in Detroit’s most integrated suburb.

  Nobody will ever do a commercial like that about Hamtramck, although there are probably more blond-haired, blue-eyed people there than Nimrod Rosenthal ever dreamed of. The little city is, like Highland Park, an island, surrounded on all sides by Detroit, which expanded around it. Its diverse population includes blacks, Albanians, Ukrainians and other Slays—but Hamtramck is, first and foremost, a Polish town.

  Unlike Chicago and other large northern cities that have experienced suburban flight, Detroit has not retained strong ethnic enclaves. The city is, as Chief Hart observed, one big ghetto all the way to its borders. Aside from a small barrio on the southwest side and a few areas on the riverfront and the outer extremities, all its neighborhoods are heavily black. Only Hamtramck, in the city but not a part of it, remains to remind people what Detroit was like thirty years age.

  In those day, the city was dotted with corner shot-and-a-beer joints—ethnic taverns like Lillie’s. A summer storm was raging outside when I walked in, and the patrons at the bar were in the midst of giving the weather a Hamtramck spin. When thunder rolled overhead, the young bartender said, “When I was little, my ma used to tell me that thunder is Jesus bowling.”

  “Yeah,” said a man in a blue work shirt, seated at the bar. “I heard that. And the lightning is the scoreboard lighting up.”

  “God, you guys,” a young woman in narrow, dark-rimmed glasses and a beehive hairdo said in mock disgust. “Jeez, bowling!”