Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  “We have a silent majority in Detroit,” he said. “White people are neglected. They don’t want to leave. There are so many people who think that the city is still what it was—Coleman Young to them is like a blackout.”

  Chris and his twenty-five-year-old brother J.C., a Wayne State student, share a house on Detroit’s far east side, in one of the city’s few remaining middle-class enclaves. J.C. is reserved and handsome, the inheritor of his father’s sex appeal. He listened to his older brother, but said nothing.

  “I’d love to get involved in Detroit politics,” said Chris, “but I don’t think it’s realistic. I’d love to see the old-time politics come back, but the Kennedys and the Cavanaughs are gone. In this city, old neighborhoods are being destroyed, old schools are closing down. The Cavanaugh years were good, happy times.”

  Mark joined the conversation. He has his father’s political ambitions, along with a strong measure of caution. He is also a realist. “Those were Camelot days,” he said. “But the riot took the steam out of that.”

  The Cavanaugh boys lost their father when they were young; they speak about him warmly, but with a certain detachment. A good deal of what they know about him seems to come from history books or the recollections of former cronies.

  “In 1963, dad marched with Martin Luther King,” Chris said. J.C. nodded; he had heard that, too.

  “If dad were alive today, Detroit would break his heart,” said Chris. “I think that Coleman Young is awfully intimidating.”

  “Well, there’s a certain amount of balancing the scales that had to be done,” Mark said judiciously. “Coleman has gone to the school of hard knocks, like us. The Irish were the niggers of the world in the early 1900s.” He thought about what he had said and began to explain it, when his younger brother broke in.

  “Put niggers in quotes,” Chris instructed. “And put in that he tried to cover up afterwards.” He laughed, a full-throated laugh that had once belonged to a young liberal by the name of Jerome P. Cavanaugh.

  Nobody bothers to put the word nigger in quotes at the City Residence Club. Whites in Detroit have learned to be circumspect in their language, but at the Residence Club, the storefront headquarters of Coleman Young’s political machine, there are no whites, and nigger is a term of endearment.

  The few white visitors to the clubhouse are quickly reminded of the realities of Coleman Young’s Detroit. When I stopped by, accompanied by a member, we were greeted at the door by Chuck Bailey, a large man in a leather cap. “If you’re with her you must be all right,” he said, gesturing toward my host. “But down in Georgia, my daddy used to say that it ain’t enough for a white man to be all right. You got to be all all right.” He laughed, but there was a hard edge to it; at the City Residence Club, the white man’s burden is the burden of proof.

  It was a few days before the presidential election of 1988, and the Residence Club was serving as a headquarters for the Dukakis campaign in Detroit. Dukakis’s people were counting on the city to offset the expected Bush vote in the once Democratic, now basically Republican, suburbs. Handbills were stacked on tables and posters of the narrow-eyed Duke hung over the door and on the walls. In the front room, wholesome-looking young men in white shirts and dark ties, political apprentices, milled around stuffing envelopes and talking into telephones. An older man supervised the activity. When the phones rang, they answered “Dukakis headquarters,” but the salutation somehow lacked conviction. As a Democrat, Dukakis would carry the city but, as elsewhere in black America, he was seen as not much more than the lesser of two evils.

  Anybody can volunteer to work in the outer office of the Residence Club, but not everyone can pass into the inner sanctum, where the serious politicians gather. The room is dominated by a long wooden table, a television set and, in the corner, a card table. That night, several civic leaders were engaged in a card-slapping game of bridge. Others lounged around talking politics. A sense of urgency about the upcoming election was notably absent.

  A retired, dapper-looking man named Mr. Holly sat at the long table and regarded me with interest. “How ya doin’?” he said, meaning, Who are you and what do you want?

  “I’m a writer from Israel,” I said. “Maybe I’ll become an honorary out-of-town member. How do I sign up?”

  The old man laughed. “All you gotta do is pay your dues,” he said, and then paused, considering. “Hell, forget that. Don’t nobody pay no dues around here anyway.”

  But there are all sorts of dues in Detroit politics, and the most important kind don’t involve money. The members of the Residence Club are old friends and political allies of the mayor, men and women who remember the city before it was delivered into the hands of its black citizens. In the campaign of 1969, when a black candidate, Richard Austin, narrowly lost to a white, Roman Gribbs, they learned the value of organization. The Residence Club, for all its informal camaraderie, has been organizing ever since.

  Its techniques are the tried-and-true commonplaces of urban politics—petition drives, telephone solicitation, door-to-door campaigning, and a little old-fashioned problem solving for the deserving citizen. Boss Tweed might not have understood the dialect, but he would have spoken their language.

  The mayor’s political power, however, does not rest entirely on the Residence Club machine. Young, who occasionally throws himself a fund-raiser, had a campaign war chest said to be in excess of four million dollars. “The mayor was raised during the Depression,” Bob Berg told me. “He doesn’t really need the money, but it makes him feel better having it around.”

  The issue of the mayor’s finances intrigues the local press and political establishment. His administration has not been scandal-free—in the early 1980s, six people, including a top city official, were convicted of bribery, conspiracy and fraud in a multi-million-dollar sludge-removal scam known as the Vista case—but, although the FBI investigated him, there never has been any proof that Young was involved.

  Despite the absence of evidence, Young’s enemies believe that he must be a crook. The chief proponent of this theory is state senator Gil DeNello, who grew up in an Italian neighborhood called Cagalube, which, he says proudly, means “where the fox shits.”

  “My biggest criticism of Coleman Young is that he is using his political office, that the public has entrusted him with, for his own personal gain. Enriching himself in favors and money,” DeNello said. “Do you think Coleman is above taking money under the table? They tapped his phone. The mere fact that the mayor of this town was involved in this shit [the Vista scandal]—there’s a saying that the appearance of impropriety is worse than actuality.… He’s got four million dollars and his people are starving. The government won’t tackle him because he’s black and they’re afraid of another riot. But the man belongs in jail. He’s let his own people down.”

  At the Residence Club, DeNello’s unsubstantiated charges elicited little more than a yawn. Besides, nobody there seemed to think that the mayor had let them down. A businessman spoke for everybody. “I’ll tell you the truth. I ain’t doin’ good, I’m doing got-damned good,” he said. “Mind now, I got along before. I ain’t never bought no shoes better than the other ones.”

  Young’s critics have compared the mayor to another master of municipal machine politics, Richard C. Daley. Young himself has a high regard for the methods of the late Chicago mayor, and there are, indeed, some similarities of technique. Young, like Daley, has been in office a long time; and if, after sixteen years, some of his appointees want to help their boss by turning out for a political rally or fund-raiser, this seems to him to be nothing more than commendable loyalty.

  In the summer of 1988, Young raised a proposal for casino gambling in Detroit. The proposal was opposed by what he calls the ABC (Anybody But Coleman) coalition, good government types and the churches, some of which objected on moral grounds, others because they feared it might cut into their bingo business. The antigambling forces staged a rally downtown early one Saturday morning, but
their speakers were drowned out by hundreds of aroused procasino people who happened to drift by with posters, leaflets and bullhorns. Many also happened to be employed by the city of Detroit. The proposal failed to overcome the moral reservations of Detroiters, but it was an impressive show of force by the mayor, all the same.

  At about the same time, Young suffered a far more serious defeat. In the Michigan primary he supported Michael Dukakis, largely because he hates Jesse Jackson. This animosity goes back to Young’s first campaign, in 1973, when, his supporters claim, Jackson demanded payment for endorsing him. The mayor, who is proud of his own executive abilities, was also contemptuous of the preacher-politician’s rhetorical flourishes. “The only thing Jesse ever ran was his mouth,” he once said.

  Despite the mayor’s opposition, Jackson carried Detroit overwhelmingly; even many of Young’s own loyalists voted for him. Ironically, people went for Jackson for much the same reason they supported the mayor—because they saw him as a defiant black man whose conventional credentials for office were beside the point.

  These setbacks were not taken seriously at the Residence Club, however. “Coleman ain’t the best candidate,” a member told me happily. “He’s the only candidate.”

  That fall, a year before the next mayoral campaign, Young was not worried about reelection. According to his spokesman, Bob Berg, his main concern was helping Michael Dukakis beat George Bush. “We can’t afford another four years of Reaganism,” Berg said, echoing his boss.

  Under “Old Pruneface,” Detroit, like other major cities, experienced lean times. The local mythology is that the city was singled out for special punishment, but this doesn’t seem to be true. Young’s own staff told me that under Reagan, Detroit got more federal money than any big city except New York. The problem was more structural than personal: Reagan’s policy was to steer federal funds to state governments for disbursal to the cities, rather than to give them it directly, as Carter had.

  In any event, Young was willing to help the Democrats. In the weeks before the election he stumped the city, turning up at events he would have normally skipped, sharing the dais with a number of visiting politicos. Still, it didn’t seem like his heart was in it; political pros said he was sulking over Jackson’s primary victory.

  One morning about ten days before election day, Young joined another of Jackson’s critics, Coretta Scott King, at a get-out-the-vote rally at the Veteran’s Memorial Building. Nominally it was a nonpartisan affair, but since there are more Eskimos than Republicans in Detroit, no one had any doubt who its beneficiary would be.

  Like all public meetings, this one began with gospel singing, “One in the Father, One in the Son.” Then Kim Weston sang black America’s national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” This, too, is standard Detroit practice. On occasions when the presence of white dignitaries makes “The Star-Spangled Banner” necessary, the master of ceremonies invariably follows it by saying, “Now we will sing our anthem,” and “Lift Every Voice” is performed.

  An invocation followed. Mrs. King, for whom praying comes naturally, lowered her eyes reverently. Coleman Young, for whom it evidently does not, took the occasion to glance through some papers.

  Young’s lack of piety is impressive, especially for a politician in such a devout city. He was raised a Catholic, although he left the church early; typically, his memories of it revolve around its bias against blacks in general and him in particular. When he graduated from St. Mary’s elementary school, Young was turned down for scholarships by three Catholic high schools, despite his A average. A teacher told him that he had only been considered because they thought he was Asian; blacks were ineligible.

  Almost sixty years later that memory still rankles. A few days earlier, the Archdiocese of Detroit announced that it was closing 43 of the 114 churches in the city—the largest shutdown in the history of the American church. Young, who snarls at shopkeepers who move their stores to the suburbs, took the news with an uncharacteristic public shrug. Privately he made it clear that he was not sorry to see the churches close. “What Cardinal Shaka did is only good sense,” he told me. “Catholics are mostly white, and they’ve left the city. And a lot of the churches that are still here have erected racial barriers. Why should the church subsidize prejudice?”

  There was more than just the memory of a youthful insult behind this attitude. The ethnic whites who have remained in the city—mostly elderly, mostly Catholic—are a major faction in the ABC vote. The church itself has never been an active enemy of the mayor; but, funded and led independently, it is one of the few institutions he doesn’t dominate.

  The evangelical flavor of the get-out-the-vote meeting continued through the introductory remarks. The mayor of Highland Park began her speech with a ritual, “Giving praise unto God who is the head of my life,” in much the same way that Iranian mullahs praise Allah before every public utterance.

  In the back of the room, I spotted a group I had come to think of as “The Mayor’s Men.” They are the new political class of Detroit, ubiquitous young black men in power suits and gleaming glasses who congregate whenever Young is present. They stood in small clusters and exchanged the coin of municipal government—gossip about contracts, appointments, and what the mayor had said to them just the other day. From time to time they switched groups, like partners in a folk dance.

  Not far away, all alone, stood Dick “Night Train” Lane, the legendary former defensive back of the Detroit Lions, and a crony of Young. Lane, who runs the Police Athletic Program, was dressed out of another era—purple suit draped over his now dining-car-sized frame, and tan shoes. He is an anachronism in an administration dominated by smooth, polished young men, but it was hard to imagine the mayor, smoother and more polished than any of them, sipping late-night brandies in the Manoogian mansion with the woolworsted yuppies.

  When the time came, Coleman Young offered the crowd a few platitudes about good citizenship and then introduced Coretta King. They embraced, making an odd couple. Mrs. King is the living symbol of the civil rights movement, the custodian of her husband’s legend, with all the moral fervor and idealism it implies. Young, who came out of the labor movement and the smoke-filled rooms of big-city politics, is closer in temperament, if not in ideology, to Boss Curly than to any southern preacher.

  Mrs. King made a fine speech about the need for black people to elect candidates who support their interests. As she talked, Young grew visibly restless. He glanced more often at his official papers and looked around the room. The men in the suits tried to catch his eye. Occasionally he acknowledged them with a nod or a gesture. When the speech ended, the mayor seemed relieved. He gave Mrs. King an avuncular kiss on the cheek, gathered up his papers and headed back to his office, where there was real work to do. The men climbed into their city cars and followed.

  They were there again, a day or two later, at a political breakfast at the Lomax church. The mayor’s men were virtually indistinguishable from the hundred or so ministers in attendance, who were also dressed like investment bankers. The bureaucrats and divines sat at long tables as white-clad members of the ladies’ auxilliary passed among them with plates of bacon and eggs, grits and biscuits. Occasionally the churchwomen collided with political aspirants who walked through the crowd passing out pamphlets and campaign buttons like waiters in a dim sum restaurant.

  Coleman Young entered, accompanied by Congressman Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and took his place at the head table. The ministers stood at respectful attention and applauded, and a line immediately formed a few feet from the dais. One by one they approached the mayor for brief whispered conversations, each of which ended in a whooping laugh. Men of God on Sunday, during the week they were Young’s precinct captains, and he treated them each to a one-liner or anecdote they could dine out on in the days ahead.

  Congressman Fauntroy rose to introduce the mayor. “People love Coleman Young,” he told them, “because he always says the appropriate word—the appropriate word.�
�� A laugh went up; everybody knew what word Fauntroy was talking about. “And he says it the way you like to say it,” Fauntroy added, getting an even bigger laugh.

  Young’s remarks were, once again, brief and dry. He is a good speaker, but not an inspired one. Probably twenty men in the room were better orators. Unlike Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, or Fauntroy himself, all of whom are ordained ministers, Young lacks the intense, gospel-inspired cadences of the church. When he attacked the Reagan administration and called the members of its civil rights commission “Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimahs,” they hollered “Yessir!” and “That’s right!” but these were courtesy calls. Fauntroy’s compliment notwithstanding, the mayor is appreciated more for what he says than how he says it.

  The congressman’s speech was a different story. He is the pastor of one of the largest black churches in Washington, and he was in his element, quoting from the Bible, praising the preachers for their political power (“Black ministers are the umpires, and you can call this one for the Democrats”) and carrying them away with a rolling litany of past heroes. “Somebody has to vote this year for Martin Luther King,” he intoned. “Somebody has to vote for Medgar Evers. Somebody has to vote for Malcolm; somebody has to vote for Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman.” As he called off the names, the ministers hollered “Vote, vote!” and the church basement filled with emotional energy. Fauntroy was doing more than whipping up the troops; he was providing his fellow clergymen with a model sermon for the following Sunday morning.

  Suddenly, without warning, the congressman began to sing “The Greatest Love of All.” He sang in a high, professional voice, tore off his jacket to cheers, and swung the microphone by its cord like a nightclub crooner. The ministers stood and sang along with him, and only the tone-deaf mayor remained seated, his shoulders shaking with appreciative laughter.