Political observers in Detroit sometimes call Young “the last of the great Irish political bosses.” There is, in fact, something Skeffingtonian in his audacious, often charming, sometimes ruthless domination of Detroit. But Young is more than a tribal politician; to many, he is a hero and a savior. Fittingly, there is a hagiographic flavor to the mayor’s biography, which is usually depicted as a series of challenges heroically overcome, stations of the cross successfully executed.
The story begins with Coleman the Gifted Student, denied a scholarship because of his race. Then there is Coleman the Officer in the Tuskegee Airmen, who went to a military stockade for opposing wartime Jim Crow regulations; Coleman the Labor Leader, tossed out of the UAW for radicalism; Coleman the Defiant, dragged before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lecturing his white inquisitors on the proper way to pronounce Negro; Coleman in Exile, unable to find work for almost a decade, scratching out a living “driving a little taxi, handling a little beef”; Coleman Redux, elected to the Michigan State Senate in the mid-sixties; and Coleman the Underdog, defeating the white establishment and the Negro E-lites to become the city’s first black mayor. And, finally, Coleman the Liberator, the man who dismantled the colonialist occupying forces and brought self-determination to the people of Detroit.
An anonymous poem, published as an ad in the playbill of a city program, put it this way:
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
There’s Only One Coleman Young
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
Thank God For Mayor Coleman Young
A Man With Integrity
A Man With Personality
He’s So Brave, He’s So Smart
Yet He’s A Man With A Great, Big Heart
Coleman Young, Coleman Young
Thank God For Mayor Coleman Young.
When I saw the poem, I wondered what Brooks Patterson would think of it, or the boys in Tom Coogan’s barbershop. The mayor’s enemies concede that he is smart; some admit that he is brave; and few would disagree that he has personality, at least the kind that appeals to his own people. But integrity is not a common adjective for Coleman Young in suburbia; nor do many see him as a man “With A Great, Big Heart.” Unlike other black mayors, such as L.A.’s Tom Bradley or Atlanta’s Andrew Young, he has never sought the approval of white people, never attempted to portray himself as a comfortable bridge between the races. Young is not the credit-to-his-race type of middle-class black whom whites find reassuring. You deal with Coleman Young on his terms, or no terms at all.
Young has been divorced twice and lives alone in the Manoogian mansion on the Detroit River. He travels the city in a midnight-blue limousine (“You want a Cadillac mayor, you buy him a Cadillac”) with two bodyguards and a police escort, earns $125,000 a year (the second-highest mayoral salary in the country), and dresses in quietly elegant, double-breasted silk suits. The trappings of wealth and power convey a message, but they don’t conceal, and are not meant to conceal, the fact that he is still a street man, a signifying mayor who uses the style and language of Black Bottom to delight his supporters and shock his opponents.
It took me about three days in Detroit to realize just what a powerful man he is. For one thing, whites—in and out of the city—couldn’t stop complaining about him. For another, none of the municipal officials I contacted for appointments would return my calls. “In this city, nobody will say anything without Coleman’s okay,” a reporter explained. “You better see him and let him know what you’re up to.”
I tried, but it wasn’t easy; the mayor’s press policy could not be described as open-door. You need a sponsor to get an appointment. Finally I found somebody who knew somebody who talked with Young’s spokesman, Bob Berg. After a few weeks of negotiation, I was eventually granted an audience.
I admired the technique. Young was letting me know that he wasn’t the mayor of some second-rate town; a meeting with him was a rare gift, something to be valued. This approach worked (it always does); I went to our first interview feeling like the Cowardly Lion on the way to Oz.
I arrived at the mayoral mansion at three o’clock on a sweltering August afternoon. An aide ushered me into the living room and told me to wait. I used the time to browse through a stack of books on the coffee table—The Holy Koran, Billyball, The Book of the Dead and Rare Breeds—A Guide to Horses—that testified to the eclectic tastes of a man who educated himself in the public library. The room was filled with memorabilia from his various trips—a Samuri sword and Japanese suit of armor, African sculpture—and a larger-than-life bust of His Honor. It is a bachelor’s living room, seldom used except for official occasions.
After half an hour or so, Bob Berg appeared and walked me upstairs to the mayor’s study, a cluttered and mercifully air-conditioned room. There, at half past three in the afternoon, I found the mayor of Detroit, dressed in blue pin-striped pajamas and a checkered bathrobe.
The television set in the room was tuned to CNN, and a deck of playing cards sat on the desk. Interviewers often mention the fact that the mayor conducts conversations while watching the tube and playing solitaire. The implication is that he is easily distracted, or perhaps a bit eccentric. But, as I came to discover, there is a white interpretation of Young’s actions, and a black one. Toward the end of our conversation that day, I asked him why he kept the television on.
“I don’t really watch this thing,” the mayor said, gesturing toward the set. “But I like to have it on in the background. See, I don’t want people listening in on my conversations.” This is not paranoia; several years ago, during an investigation into a municipal scandal, the FBI bugged the mayor’s private townhouse.
And what about the solitaire? I asked.
“I only play when I get bored,” said the mayor dryly, and his shoulders shook with silent laughter.
Humor is Coleman Young’s great solvent. He uses it to shock and deflate, charm and conciliate, or just to amuse himself. Young has the timing of a professional comedian, and the keen ear of an impersonator. Bilingual, he is able to switch back and forth effortlessly between perfectly crafted English and street talk. The latter is used primarily to disconcert what he calls “the black boogie wazzie” and other “phoney-ass people.” Since unknown white visitors are all suspect, he usually prefers to begin with profanity and jive, enabling him to size them up on his linguistic turf.
That afternoon, when I entered his office, the mayor was engrossed in some official papers. After a time he looked up and shook his head. “They want me to pass out free condoms, because of this AIDs thing,” he said, dropping the documents on the desk with an exasperated gesture. “Hell, why do I have to get involved in this? I neither condemn, nor do I condone, ah … fuckin’.” He paused and peered out of narrowed eyes for my reaction.
“Mr. Mayor,” said Berg, “this interview is on the record.”
“Oh,” said Young, in mock alarm. “Well, in that case, you better say that I, ah, condone fuckin’. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea about me.”
I laughed. I had no idea if this was the appropriate response, but the remark struck me as funny. What the hell, I thought, at least I got one good quote.
Switching subjects but not tactics, the mayor mentioned a construction project that had run into some opposition because it would require uprooting part of a cemetery. “They got this Greek priest who’s leading the protests,” he said. “I found out that the motherfucker is from Warren. He doesn’t even have a got-damned church.” Again he turned his eyes on high beam and peered across the desk. I don’t know what he saw, but he was apparently satisfied; he conducted the rest of the interview in more or less conventional language.
Later, Berg, a white former newsman, explained that Young has an infallible way of gauging white attitudes toward blacks. The cursing is a part of the test, and people who flunk have very short audiences with His Honor.
Young’s conversational style is rambling and circuitous, but he always returns
to the point, which is usually connected in some way with white racism and its crippling effect on blacks. Some of this is posturing; the mayor is far too sophisticated to believe that his city’s problems—especially its crime problem—can be attributed wholly to discrimination, past or present. His enemies say, with justice, that he uses suburb-bashing as a tool for deflecting criticism, much as southern segregationists a generation ago hollered “nigger” to make poor whites forget their own misery. Young’s attacks on the “hostile suburbs” are calculated to rally support, create an us-against-the-world atmosphere that he, as supreme commander of “us,” can use for political gain.
But there is no doubt that militance is more than a tactic; Young genuinely sees the world in racial terms. And when it comes to assessing guilt, he refuses to play the liberal game of dividing the blame and splitting the difference. “I view racism not as a two-way street,” he once told a conference on race relations. “I think racism is a system of oppression. I don’t think black folks are oppressive to anybody, so I don’t consider that blacks are capable of racism.”
Young also rejects the popular notion that the problems of black people—and of black Detroit—are a seamless web. “I’m not going to buy that vicious-cycle theory,” Young told the Detroit Free Press in 1987. “It starts with economic pressure, and the first economic pressure was slavery.… It reminds me of something Martin Luther King said. ‘How do you expect us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps when we don’t even have boots?’ ” Improving on Dr. King, the mayor added a coda: “The motherfuckers stole our boots.”
The sense that Detroit has been fleeced and abandoned runs through Young’s conversation. So does resentment of whites who have left but continue to meddle in the city’s affairs. “I don’t know of any other city in the nation where there’s such a preoccupation in the suburbs for control,” he said. “The same people who left the city for racial reasons still want to control what they’ve left.”
Paradoxically, some blacks feel that Young himself has opened the door for white interference. Since taking office he has concentrated on rebuilding the downtown, and most of his grandiose projects have been financed and built by whites such as Henry Ford II and Max Fisher. The mayor is unapologetic about the strategy—which he views as necessary for creating jobs—or the tactic of marshaling suburban help. He is realistic in assessing the problem: “Ain’t no black people wielding any of the major power—economic power—in this city,” he said.
The inability to translate political control into economic self-sufficiency is perhaps Young’s greatest frustration. He goes through life keeping score: how many for us, how many for them. The dominant theme of his administration has been to get more black numbers on the scoreboard, but judged by that standard, he has been a disappointment. Only fourteen black-owned companies in Detroit earned more than $10 million in 1987, and six of them were auto dealerships. Even more revealing, of the twenty-five largest black-owned companies, just two were building firms whose combined income was $6.6 million. “The head of the Minority Contractors Association runs a soul food restaurant on Seven Mile Road,” a columnist for one of the daily papers said. “That tells you all you need to know, right there.”
Professional people have done better, although not as well as might be expected in a black-run city. A few weeks after our first meeting, the mayor attended the dedication of a downtown building. The architects involved stood on the podium. One was a towering black man, well over six-five. After the ceremony, he was introduced, by a mutual friend, to the mayor. “I noticed you up there,” Young said.
“It’s kind of hard to miss me,” said the architect. “I was the tallest one on the stage.”
“Yeah, and the only nigger, too,” snapped Young.
The mayor’s critics say that his tough racial rhetoric has kept whites from moving back to the city, but he dismisses the notion. “White people find it extremely hard to live in an environment they don’t control,” he observed archly.
This is very likely true, but the mayor has done little to allay the fears of his neighbors. A few years ago, Detroit constructed a monument to Joe Louis. The statue—a giant black fist—stands at the foot of Woodward Avenue, off the Lodge Expressway, where white commuters can’t miss it; it is not the sort of symbol calculated to calm jittery suburban nerves.
Nor is Coleman Young anybody’s idea of a law-and-order mayor. In his first inaugural address he made his famous remark about crooks hitting Eight Mile Road, but if they did, others have taken their place. And the fact that Young, who has an abiding distrust of cops, took that opportunity to include racist policemen in his list of personae non grata, did not endear him to the department.
Occasionally the mayor, reacting to public outcries, has assumed a sterner stance. After a spate of shootings in schools, he called for metal detectors at schoolhouse entrances. In the wake of persistent reports that Detroit cops were using drugs, he advocated random testing in the department. Both decisions violated his own principles of civil rights, and he adopted them with obvious reluctance.
Despite these sporadic get-tough efforts, however, Coleman Young clings resolutely to his old image as a bad-ass rebel. The mayor has an extensive collection of firearms, and he talks about guns with fond expertise. Within minutes of assuring me that Detroit’s violent image is a media exaggeration, he bragged about how dangerous the city is. “I always carried a gun when I knew it was necessary,” he said of the years before he became mayor. “In the old days, in the barbershop, there was a guy named Sol—Solomon—who used to make regular gun runs to Ohio. We’d order any damn gun we wanted.” Today, with two bodyguards, he no longer packs his own piece, but he leaves no doubt that he would know what to do with one.
Young’s machismo makes him a dubious role model for the city’s teenagers. Toward the end of the year, the mayor appeared before a group of two hundred high school students at a rally of Congressman George Crockett’s Youth Caucus. The kids, all but one of whom were black, listened avidly but with a certain bemusement as the mayor lectured them about their civic duties.
“I know I have the responsibility to close down the crack houses and scoop up the guns,” he said. But, he told them, they had to cooperate—by saying no to drugs, helping their friends to stay clean, and by calling the police to report crack dealers at school or in the neighborhood. The mayor used a mixture of mild profanity and occasional slang to make the point, and unlike most septuagenarians, he carried it off; Coleman Young’s street talk is still impeccable.
“Now,” he hollered to the kids, “are you tired of crime?”
“Yeah!” they chorused.
“Are you going to do something about it?”
“Yeah!” they answered.
“Are you prepared to point a finger and drop a dime on the sons of a bitch who’re dealing?” he thundered.
“No!” yelled most of the audience, with a spontaneity that startled the mayor. He narrowed his eyes, but his shoulders began to work, suppressing laughter. He made them answer again, getting a halfhearted “Yeah” the second time, but it was clear that everybody knew where everybody else stood.
Later, when I asked him about the rally, his eyes crinkled up and he began to laugh. “Did you really expect that the kids would agree to turn in pushers?” I wondered.
“Shit no; I know about the code of silence,” he said.
“Would you have turned in a drug dealer when you were their age?” I asked, and he looked at me as if I were softheaded.
“Me?” he said, in a tone of disbelief. “Hell no. But don’t forget, it was a different city then. Cops used to shoot black kids for fun. They’d tell you to run, and call themselves shooting over your head, and shoot you in the back. I learned when I was ten or eleven not to turn my back on a cop.” Although he could fire the chief of police with a phone call, there is still a lot of little Coleman in him, and the people of his city, the good guys and the bad guys, sense it.
One of the ways in
which Coleman Young conveys his allegiance to his roots is through the use of profanity; when the mood is on him, he elevates cussing to a minor art form. Suburbanites and some prissy Detroiters complain about the mayor’s foul language, and church leaders often grumble that, as a role model, the mayor shouldn’t be saying “all kinds of bitches and motherfuckers.” Young, for his part, genuinely savors the shock value of his rough talk.
The newspapers in Detroit often go into reportorial contortions to convey the mayor’s language. Many interviews with him look as if they were written in Morse code, dots and dashes filling in for unprintable words. Local journalists take a certain pride in their inventiveness. During the mayor’s 1983 visit to Japan, for example, the Detroit Free Press began an article this way:
“When you speak Japanese,” the elderly interpreter explained, “there are many words that have different meanings by your tone of voice, your emphasis.”
“Oh, yes,” Mayor Young said. “We have words like that in English, too.”
He then pronounced a 12-letter compound expletive that he uses frequently, in various contexts …
During that same visit, Young was the dinner guest of the mayor of Toyota, Detroit’s sister city in Japan. After the meal, the Japanese host honored his colleague by donning a kimono and performing a warrior dance with a spear and fan. Then, in accordance with good manners, he asked Young to perform a dance of his own.
“I hate to disillusion you,” said Young, “but I can’t dance and I can’t sing. And I don’t like watermelon, either.”
Young is, indeed, tone-deaf, but he had changed his mind on the watermelon issue by the time, in December, he visited Detroit’s open-air Eastern Market. He was on one of his periodic forays around the city, and he stopped in to say hello to an Italian vegetable man, a crony from the old days.
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