Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  After some vigorous hand-shaking, the vendor informed the mayor that a Chinese restaurant was about to open not far from his shop. Young, a connoisseur of Chinese cooking, nodded approvingly.

  “What’s the owner’s name,” he asked.

  “Don Pollack, something like that,” said the grocer.

  “Pollack? What the hell kinda Chinaman is he?” demanded Mayor Young with mock outrage.

  Trying to recoup, the Italian offered the mayor some poinsettias for his office.

  “I don’t need no got-damned poin-settas,” said the mayor of Detroit. Pause. “How ’bout a watermelon?” The small crowd that had assembled laughed loudly. Coleman loves watermelon; we love watermelon; ergo …

  On a state visit to Zimbabwe, Coleman Young approvingly called his host, President Robert Mugabe, “a mean sucker,” and compared his own problems with the bureaucracy of Detroit to local practice. “He doesn’t have a civil service, and he can shoot people if he wants to, I guess. I can’t do that,” Young said wistfully.

  The mayor’s international style is not the product of ill-mannered buffoonery, any more than calling the governor of Michigan a “motherfucker” in a meeting or his periodic references to Ronald Reagan as “Old Pruneface” were slips on the tongue. Young’s language is calculated to get heads nodding on the corner, to serve as proof that Coleman hasn’t forgotten who he is and where he came from. A black businessman summed it up nicely. “I like Coleman because he’s him, and he ain’t gonna change him,” he said.

  Young, the Cadillac mayor, is prickly about his prerogatives as leader of the black polis. During his first administration, he went to Washington to meet with the secretary of HUD. Instead, he was greeted by a black undersecretary. “I didn’t come here to see the house nigger,” he told the official. “Get me the Man.”

  But the mayor is also capable of great charm and diplomacy when the occasion calls for it. This was in evidence one afternoon when, together with a representative of the governor’s office and the leaders of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, he unveiled a new joint marketing scheme for the tri-county area. The room at the Detroit Art Institute was crowded with businessmen in dark suits and a three-martini afterglow. On the dais, Young was the only black, a reminder of the true balance of power in the area.

  The occasion was heralded as historic. “Never before has the tri-county region presented a common face to the nation and the world,” said the governor’s man. He explained that the idea was to launch a media blitz, showing the Detroit area as a center of world technology. This was to be accomplished through a series of glitzy promo films, set to a Motown sound track, which were screened for the assembled civic leaders.

  Young sat watching the films with an amused look on his face, and from time to time he went into a private spasm of laughter. When he was introduced, his analysis of the program’s goals was a bit less high-minded than the state official’s.

  “People from Japan, Mexico and, uh, Ohio been stealing us blind,” he said, getting the chuckle he wanted. “We got to stop fighting among ourselves and go out and steal from Ohio.” The assembled businessmen and officials, many of whom had been his targets in the past, laughed and applauded, happy to be on the mayor’s good side for once.

  Following the meeting, Young was surrounded by a group of reporters. There is a keen sense of grievance in the Young administration against the local media. The mayor believes that they sensationalize and exaggerate crime in order to titillate suburbanites and increase advertising.

  As far as I could tell, reporting in Detroit is actually unusually tame. The mayor’s tactic for keeping the media in check has been to holler racism at the first sign of criticism. The daily newspapers and television stations, run by white executives, are acutely conscious of the danger of having the charge stick.

  After negative press coverage of several municipal scandals, Young’s administration commissioned three professors from Ohio University to do a media study. The report, a mostly boring review of the coverage of the scandals, concludes with the following admonition: “The media have to recognize that as long as they continue to operate in an unequal society where that inequality is based on race and do not constantly try to change that inequality by taking affirmative action, they are racist.” This is Mayor Young’s view, as well; visiting reporters are given a copy of the report as a warning that they, too, can be labeled racists.

  No one is immune. The mayor publicly referred to Chauncey Bailey, a talented black journalist who writes for the Detroit News, as an Uncle Tom. Gary Baumgarten, a radio reporter who once worked for the black-owned Michigan Chronicle, was smeared as a racist for extending professional courtesy to a visiting Japanese television crew that produced an unflattering documentary on the city. In Baumgarten’s case, the mayor not only blasted his reporting, he gave him a push in the chest when the two met at a news conference.

  The Young tactic of Mau-mauing the press has left reporters ambivalent toward him. His flamboyant style makes him a journalist’s dream, but it is extremely hard to get any real news out of him or his employees.

  “Detroit is an ideal place to train for covering the Kremlin,” a Free Press reporter told me. “You can’t get any information in this city, even about things that are in the public domain. No one will talk to you without permission, and the mayor is the only one who can give permission.”

  Unlike other cities, where politicians eagerly cultivate reporters, most of the journalists who cover the mayor have never had a personal conversation with him. A Free Press reporter, who has been on the city hall beat off and on for several years, refused to believe that I had been invited to Young’s home. “He actually served you a glass of lemonade?” the reporter asked with evident incredulity. “Christ, he’s never given me a glass of water.”

  At that first meeting, I mentioned to the mayor that I was having trouble making appointments with city officials. He reacted with a disingenuous astonishment, apparently unable to believe that public servants would withhold information from the press. “Bob will take care of it,” he said, gesturing toward his press secretary.

  Bob’s help proved unnecessary. Within an hour of our meeting I was flooded with phone calls from bureaucrats who suddenly wanted to talk. I have no idea how they found out I had met with their boss, but they knew. It was a lesson in the power of Coleman Young, and the antipress attitude he has fostered among his officials.

  That attitude was on display at the Art Institute as the mayor laid into the assembled reporters. “I’m tired of you printing allegations and unfounded rumors,” he told them in a stern voice, and went on to accuse them of being tools of their editors.

  Young’s vehemence put the journalists on the defensive. “Mr. Mayor,” protested one, “believe me, I rarely get any requests from my editors about what to write.”

  Young looked at him contemptuously. “Hell yeah, rarely, that’s what I just said.”

  “You mean we shouldn’t report when—” began a journalist, but the mayor cut him off. “Yeah, you should not report an unfounded allegation, goddamn it,” he snapped. Having got their attention, he then announced that he planned to sue the local press—in toto—for libel.

  “You mean you’re going to sue us?” a young woman television correspondent asked plaintively, opening the way for a Colemanism. “Hell, no, I’m not gonna sue you,” he said. “I’m gonna sue the got-damn owners. Reporters don’t have any money.”

  Despite the battering, the reporters stayed clustered around him. No one really protested, no one walked away in anger. Young’s indignation was finely calibrated. He hit just the right note, made his point, and kept his audience.

  The mayor has the ability to captivate white people in face-to-face encounters, but he doesn’t use it promiscuously. It is a tool in his arsenal, like the cursing, the suburb-baiting and the occasional outbursts of his incendiary temper. He is capable of cordial, even close relations with trusted whites, especially old comrades from the radi
cal union days, and he has been able to build strong working relationships with a number of wealthy businessmen. But these are always based on mutual interest, never on sentiment. Coleman Young is the black mayor of a black city, a fact never far from his consciousness.

  As Arthur Johnson observed, in no other place in the country have blacks succeeded in gathering so much political power into their own hands; specifically, the hands of the mayor. After four terms, he has cast the city government in his own image. Five of the nine members of the City Council are black. So were the chief of police, the fire chief, all four police commissioners, and the heads of most city departments (and, although Young does not appoint them, both congressmen, the superintendent of schools and a majority of the city’s judges). The few whites on the mayor’s personal staff were in positions that required liaison with the outside world. Spokesman Bob Berg’s job was to maintain lines of communication with the mostly white press corps. Young’s chief federal lobbyist, Dorothy Brody, was recruited to deal with the Washington establishment. June Roselle, a holdover from the Gribbs administration, was the mayor’s main fund-raiser. Roselle, Berg, Brody and a handful of others were accepted because they were Young’s people, but they exercised no independent power of their own.

  In city departments, where they are a minority, whites often feel like outsiders. One senior official told me that she received bomb threats from colleagues because she was not part of the “black political mafia.” Others complained about reverse racism, although not on the part of the mayor himself. But most people simply take the black complexion of the administration for granted. After all, Coleman Young is not exactly the first big-city mayor to provide patronage and power to his own supporters.

  But Young has done more than broaden access to the pork barrel. Under him, Detroit has become not merely an American city that happens to have a black majority, but a black metropolis, the first major Third World city in the United States. The trappings are all there—showcase projects, black-fisted symbols, an external enemy and the cult of personality. Detroit has even developed a quasi-official ideology that regards the pre–Young era as a time of white colonialism, ended by the 1967 insurrection and its aftermath. An official city publication describes the police department as having been “a hostile white army, entrusted by white authorities with the job of keeping nonwhites penned up in ghettoes.”

  Not surprisingly, some of Coleman Young’s closest associates identify readily with Africa and the Third World. One of them, Ron Hewitt, the city’s planning director, is a disciple of Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman.

  “Race is the element that makes Detroit completely different from other American cities,” Hewitt told me. “We are seen as not just black, but aggressive and assertive. I told the mayor that the chief thing that enrages the suburbs is that he has the temerity to actually believe that he is the mayor. People in the suburbs want us to fail. The situation here is very similar to postcolonial situations in the Third World. People always say, ‘The Africans can’t govern themselves,’ and that’s what they say about us, too.”

  Hewitt, no less than Young himself, regards the relationship with the surrounding white communities as an ongoing war of liberation. “If you feel at the end of every day that you have struggled, that’s liberating. That’s probably the extent of the black man’s liberation in America. Now, we may lose the struggle with the suburbs, but we will make it interesting. They better bring their lunch.”

  Hewitt is the planner for America’s sixth largest city, once the symbol of the country’s industrial power. But the old myths of the Arsenal of Democracy mean little to him. “As a people we have more soul, we are more spiritual than others,” he said. “Our technology will be tempered by that soul. If white folks could leave us alone and give us the resources, we could solve our own problems.”

  Outsiders, especially white outsiders, tend to view this sort of talk with skepticism; Detroit is the place where blacks have been left on their own to sink or swim—and, by every conventional measure of prosperity, security and growth, they are sinking. Even senior officials and politicians cannot isolate themselves from the morass of poverty and violence—several years ago, Ron Hewitt’s own son was shot to death in a street incident.

  But most black Detroiters do not measure their lives, or their city, by the yardsticks of the American middle class. Young may not have provided them with the safest streets or most efficient services; nor has he been able to raise their standard of living. But he has given his constituents something even more valuable: a feeling of empowerment and personal worth. Detroit is one of the few places in the country where blacks can live in a sympathetic, black-oriented milieu.

  “Detroit is an environment where you can forget about being black,” said Cassandra Smith-Gray, who heads the city’s welfare department. “I don’t think about being black, because everybody is. This is a very different place from the South Bronx, L.A. or Jackson, Mississippi. Here, our government is black. This is not the real world. Some of my anger has been knocked out, but it comes back if I cross Eight Mile Road.”

  Detroit’s politics and government are now so monochromatic that it is hard to recall that in the not too distant past, America’s sixth largest city was governed by men with names like Cobo, Miriani and Cavanaugh. Albert Cobo has since been memorialized in a downtown convention center. Louis B. Miriani, who ended his career in prison, is largely unsung. But Jerome Cavanaugh, once the wunderkind of American municipal politics, is still something of a presence in Detroit. Although the former mayor died more than a decade ago, he lives on in the memory of a coterie of loyalists, who recall his administration as the Motor City Camelot.

  Once a month the Cavanaugh Clan gathers at the Irish Saloon on Trumbull Avenue, near Tiger Stadium. There, in the back room, they meet to recall old times, plot new strategies and keep the Cavanaugh machine together.

  Of course they have no hope of regaining control of the city; demographics and the far more muscular Young machine have made that an impossibility. Unlike New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, white candidates are no longer taken seriously in Detroit. Cavanaugh’s forces have retreated to the suburbs, where they have parlayed experience, solidarity and residual popularity into county office.

  Many of them were there at the Irish Saloon one afternoon in late October: Cliff Sullivan, Cavanaugh’s city assessor; Bobby Holmes of the Teamsters Union; Woody Youngblood, registrar of deeds in Wayne County; and a triumvirate of Irish judges—Tom Gallagher, Joe A. Sullivan and Joe B. Sullivan (presumably Cavanaugh left office before his machine could find a Joe C.). They were, for the most part, hale-looking men in late middle age, dressed in suburban leisurewear and sporting exemplary dentures.

  At a table near the corner sat Bart Donlan, a spruce, handsome man of seventy-eight with glistening eyes and a dry sense of humor. Donlan, once the secretary of the Board of Health and district chairman of the Democratic Party, now lives in Warren, and he is one of the driving forces behind the monthly conclaves. When I asked if the supporters of any other former mayor, such as Louis Miriani, still held similar gatherings, he shook his head. “Miriani had the misfortune of going to jail,” he explained philosophically.

  In the old days the Cavanaugh machine was known as the Irish Mafia, although a number of its members were Jewish. Detroit has never had a dominant Irish population like those of some eastern cities, but, according to Donlan, people like to vote for the Irish. “When the Poles run out of Polish candidates to vote for, they always pick an Irishman,” he said.

  People stopped by Donlan’s table to pay respects and josh with the old man, whom one described as “Jerry Cavanaugh’s Dutch uncle.” When Tyrus (named for Ty Cobb) Place, the group’s lone Republican, came over to say hello, Donlan regarded his Bush for President button with amused contempt. “They named a whole league after your candidate,” he said with a disarming smile.

  From time to time Donlan scanned the crowded room, counting the present and noting the absent. Wayne Co
unty executive Ed MacNamara wasn’t there that day, nor was Patty Knox, the state liquor commissioner, or Jim Killeen, the county clerk. Their absence was more than compensated for, however, by the presence of three of Cavanaugh’s eight children.

  Mark Cavanaugh, a studious-looking young man, was running for a seat on the court of appeals in Oakland County, and his campaign was very much on the agenda. The meeting opened with Donlan’s wife announcing a hundred-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser for him at a suburban eatery. Mark, who needed no introduction, stood and waved.

  More announcements followed. Ex-state senator Eddie Robinson reminded the group of the Monsignor Kern golf outing. Then Cliff Sullivan introduced a guest, a black police inspector. There were a few elderly black men in the room, obligatory officeholders from the time when tokenism was a liberal necessity, but the inspector clearly wasn’t one of the old guard; Coleman Young speaks well of Cavanaugh, but his appointees don’t come from the Irish Mafia. The inspector was a representative of the new order, a reminder that outside the congenial atmosphere of the Irish Saloon, Detroit is now in the hands of blacks. The officer stood up and took a bow, and there was an awkward silence until a lilting voice called out, “It’s nice to have a fine Irishman like yourself on the force,” and the tension in the room dissolved into laughter.

  The old-time Cavanaugh people are nothing if not professionals, and they regard Coleman Young with a dispassionate admiration uncommon among white Detroiters. “Sure he cries racism all the time,” said a lawyer. “But that’s just politics. The man is brilliant.”

  The only amateurs present that day were Cavanaugh sons Chris and J.C., who were there to show solidarity with brother Mark’s campaign. The Cavanaughs do not look like brothers; it’s as if each was sired by a different aspect of their father’s complex personality. Chris, in his late twenties, is a Notre Dame graduate who said he was “just basically taking it easy,” although he hoped to go into sales. He is the nostalgic Cavanaugh, the custodian of his father’s legacy, and he was far from complimentary about the new regime.