Devil's Night

by Ze'ev Chafets

  I was sitting next to Jim Holley, who had greeted me with a collegial “Good morning, Reverend,” when I came in. He cheered and clapped with the others, but I knew he wasn’t applauding for the mayor. The two men have clashed often, particularly over Holley’s support of Jesse Jackson. Young calls Holley “an Oreo” and the feeling is mutual.

  As I watched the mayor leave, surrounded by his entourage, I recalled what Holley had told me about him a few weeks before. We had been sitting in his study when Young’s name came up, and suddenly the black rabbi sounded like Brooks Patterson.

  “We asked for control of this city,” he said. “Well, now we’re in control and everything is out of control. We don’t build anything, not even a grocery store. The mayor has been in office fifteen years and only two blacks own anything downtown. Why? Because we don’t hold Coleman accountable. What we have is a group of blacks running a black plantation.”

  I mentioned to Holley that the mayor seemed pretty popular for a plantation master.

  “Maybe he’s still popular, but there were slaves who loved their owners, too,” he said. “If Coleman was white, he would have been gone a long time ago, and that’s a fact. But black politicians think they can do any damn thing to black people and get away with it. White people aren’t our problem. They don’t control our schools. We got to stop blaming white people for everything.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” he continued. “If Coleman gets in trouble, he’ll get a white lawyer. A slave is a slave, whether he’s in the house or the field. We call them rent-a-Toms today. Their job is to keep the black folks calm and quiet. Coleman feeds us emotions and gives the bread to the white folks. And you can’t ride to freedom in Pharaoh’s chariot. Maybe once he was good for this city, but it’s time for him to move on—it’s Joshua time.”

  Holley’s was a minority opinion among black Detroiters that fall. Despite the city’s manifest difficulties, he was still Big Daddy, leader of the revolution, first president of the republic, field marshal of the forces of retribution. If he had not solved all their problems, he had at least provided the people of Detroit some of the nation’s best political theater. And, more important, he had given them a sense of control over some portion of their own lives. For this they forgave him his trespasses, as he condemned their trespassers.

  Surrounded by reverent loyal appointees, sustained by a campaign fund that made a run at his job impractical at best, checked-and-balanced by a city council grown accustomed to his authoritarian rule, supported by a white industrial establishment indebted to him for keeping the lid on, covered by a press frequently charmed and bludgeoned into averting its gaze, in the fall of 1988, Coleman Young was perhaps the most powerful and independent black politician in the United States.

  And yet, a year before the next election, even some of Young’s strongest supporters were beginning to wonder how long he could go on. He was seventy years old and, some said, not in the best of health. Worse, it was whispered that the old lion was going soft. He had taken his casino gambling defeat almost philosophically, had gone out of his way to patch things up with Jesse Jackson; and it had been months since his last tirade against the hostile suburbs.

  More and more he was given to reflection. One day, during a drive through the city in the mayoral limo, he unexpectedly mentioned the fact that Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson exchange kisses in public.

  “You know something?” he said. “I never even kissed my father when I was a kid. It was that macho thing we had. I don’t think I hugged him more than a couple of times. It’s only in the last few years that I feel comfortable embracing another man, and I’m past seventy.” Young looked into the distance, and suddenly he seemed strangely vulnerable. He wondered aloud how long he could continue. Sometimes, he said, he dreams of a quiet old age, far removed from his battles with the suburbs and the challenges of his job. He talked of the joys of peace and solitude, a well-earned rest. It was a moving, convincing meditation, and his spokesman, Bob Berg, listened to it with growing concern.

  “So, am I ready to bow out gracefully?” Coleman Young asked in what seemed to be a rhetorical tone. “Am I ready?” Suddenly the mayor of Detroit crinkled his eyes and his shoulders began to work up and down. “Hell no, I ain’t ready,” he said. “They’ll have to carry me out on my fucking shield.”

  Chapter Seven

  THE FAT LADY SINGS

  Early in 1989, election year, Coleman Young got some unexpected news—he was a father.

  The stork arrived in the form of a paternity suit filed by a thirty-five-year-old former city employee, Annivory Calvert. Calvert, now living in California, charged that Young was the father of her six-year-old son, Joel. Through her lawyers she demanded that the mayor acknowledge the boy and pay child support.

  At first, the heretofore childless seventy-one-year-old Young seemed nonplussed. “If it weren’t so serious, it would be flattering or funny,” he told the press, and then refused further comment. But it was too good a story to go away. The papers had a field day with the news that Big Daddy had become a dad. Political opponent Tom Barrow tut-tutted that the mayor was a poor role model for the city’s youth. Women’s groups demanded that Young meet his obligations. Here and there, church leaders raised their voices in moral indignation.

  Worse than the indignation were the jokes; Young became the butt of disrespectful humor. In an act of lesse majeste, a local disc jockey changed the words of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” from “Earth control to Major Tom” to “Birth control to Mayor Young,” and played it on the radio. For the first time in years, people were laughing at him, and Young didn’t like it at all.

  The election was eight months away and the mayor had no intention of running with a paternity suit on his back. When a blood test revealed that the odds were 270 billion to one that he was, indeed, the father of Annivory Calvert’s son, Young instructed his lawyer to work out a deal.

  It proved expensive—close to $1,000 a month in child support and the establishment of a $150,000 trust fund—but it was money well spent. One of the mayor’s reelection slogans was “Do the Right Thing,” and he could hardly face the electorate, many of whom were, themselves, victims of indifferent fathers, as a coldhearted skinflint.

  I was in Israel when the scandal broke, and when I returned, a month or so before the November election, I asked a reporter if it had affected the mayor’s chances. “It was bad for a while,” he said. “Some church people were offended. But it’s blown over. The truth is, a lot of folks are proud of the old man. Now there’s an heir to the crown.”

  There were also pretenders to the throne that year. Since Young first came to power, in 1973, by narrowly defeating White Hope candidate John Nichols, he had won a string of easy reelection victories over second-rate-opponents. In 1977, he beat Ernest Browne, a bland, black city councilman, by some twenty points. Four years later, he whipped an unknown white accountant, Perry Koslowski, 63 percent to 37 percent. His last time out, in 1985, Young walked through a contest against another anonymous accountant, thirty-five-year-old Tom Barrow, 61 percent to 39 percent.

  The mediocre quality of the opposition was not accidental; no serious politician wanted to take Young on. He had all the advantages of incumbency, including a multi-million-dollar campaign fund, an army of city workers, the support of organized labor and financial aid from the white surburban business establishment, which, whatever it thought of Young personally, counted on him to keep the city under control. Most important, he had the unshakable loyalty of the city’s black voters. To challenge him was to call into question the legitimacy of their revolution, and no ambitious black politician wanted to be accused of that.

  All that was left was the ABC coalition—a steady 35 percent of the vote composed mostly of elderly white ethnics who lived on the city’s fringes, and a smattering of disgruntled blacks. To beat the mayor, somebody would have to find a way of holding the dissidents and, at the same time, making inroads into his core of black admire
rs.

  In 1989, for the first time in sixteen years, it suddenly seemed possible. Young was on a losing streak—the casino gambling issue, the humiliating Jackson landslide in the 1988 Michigan presidential primary, the paternity suit—and he seemed old and vulnerable. The city’s problems were not getting any better, but Young appeared curiously detached, rarely venturing out of his office and mansion. Most important, a new generation of voters had grown up under black rule. According to the conventional wisdom, they regarded Coleman Young as a politician, not a savior. That was the feeling in the city: The old man could be taken.

  In Detroit’s two-stage electoral system, a September primary free-for-all would be followed, in November, by a runoff between the two leading candidates. No one doubted that Young would be one of them, but there was stiff competition for the second slot. Four contenders eventually came forward—Tom Barrow, on a roll after having led the antigambling crusade in the summer of 1988; Erma Henderson, the septuagenarian president of the Common Council; Charles Costa, a Maltese immigrant businessman; and, most dramatically, thirteen-term U.S. Congressman John Conyers.

  The first to declare was Costa, who cast himself as the great almost-white hope. On a morning in the late fall of 1988, he invited me to his downtown paint store-campaign headquarters for a briefing on his electoral strategy, which could best be described as flexible.

  “I’m a chameleon,” he confided. “I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal; I can be both. Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, they all think I’m one of them. And with blacks, well, I’m dark complected. They think I’m part black. I tell them that Malta is an island off the coast of Africa.”

  Costa is a small, compelling man in his fifties, with white hair and piercing brown eyes, who came to America at age sixteen, started out as an announcer at the Stone Burlesque, mastered the essentials of business (“I can play that Jewish piano, you know, the cash register”) and eventually became a major inner-city landlord. At his peak, he had some five thousand tenants, but he went bankrupt in 1971. Undaunted, he commissioned a biography, which he called Slumlord, and set himself up in the paint business, where he has flourished.

  “I’m capable of thinkin’ in the fourth dimension,” he said in a voice ringing with conviction. “What other candidate can say that? In my life I’ve done things that are incredible. I’m calculative and from a PR point of view, ain’t nobody who can beat me. I shall climb my mountain.”

  There is a certain fourth-dimensional aspect to Costa’s surroundings. He has five talking parrots in his office, a Pac-man machine, four life-sized teddy bears seated around a card table, and hundreds of antique clocks, blunderbusses, electric trains, stuffed animals, figurines, wagon wheels, model ships in bottles and other such collector’s items. His floors are covered with carpets of all nationalities, the walls adorned with uncountable pictures—mostly of Costa himself, including one taken with Ronald Reagan—busts of American presidents, a lifetime membership plaque from the NAACP and, displayed prominently, a photograph of Coleman Young.

  “Coleman is going to be history. His own people are going to put me in office,” said the Maltese challenger. “Blacks want a change. They know their own can’t cut it. I’m white but I’m not too white. I’m just right for the transition. And I talk their language. I’ve got soul.”

  To demonstrate, Costa called over a customer, a thin black man in a painter’s hat. He advised the man on the best kind of paint to buy. “And don’t forget to make a profit on the deal; that’s how you grow,” he said in a fatherly tone.

  “Hey, man, I been doin’ this for eight years,” said the painter.

  Costa shrugged. Okay, okay, just trying to help,” he said.

  Despite his chameleon-based appeal to blacks, Costa was counting mainly on substantial white support. “Thirty-five percent of the vote in Detroit is white, and historically whites vote five to one for a white candidate against a black,” he explained. “Last time two thirds of the whites didn’t vote. But this time, I’ll bring them out.”

  Costa was careful to point out that this strategy was not antiblack. “Most white people perceive all blacks as bad,” said the candidate, displaying his liberal side. “In fact, only seventy-five thousand to a hundred thousand are undesirables. The rest are fine.

  “I know there might be some opposition who would like to keep Coleman in,” he continued. “They might try to stop me. I still could be assassinated. They could drive by right now and throw a firebomb through the window. I’m not afraid, but that don’t prevail me from thinkin’ about it.”

  Morbidity does not come naturally to the ebullient Costa, however; he is a positive thinker who likes to get out on the campaign trail and mingle with the voters. That morning he loaded a batch of “Costa for Mayor” posters and leaflets into his car and headed off to press the flesh. His destination was a downtown residential hotel, its check-in counter protected by bulletproof glass. “A guy got shot here by a guy with no legs,” he said, laughing, amused by the endless vagaries of Detroit’s human comedy.

  In the airless lobby, Costa passed out literature and made small talk with the elderly white men who make up the hotel’s main clientele. A toothless fellow dressed in a dirty flannel work shirt and jeans approached, and Costa handed him a campaign leaflet. “I’m running for mayor, and I’d like your support,” he said.

  The man looked at him in disbelief. “Forget it, buddy,” he said. “You’re the wrong color. In this city, white people are toilet paper.”

  After a few more handshakes, we took the rickety elevator upstairs to meet with the hotel manager, an old friend whom Costa wanted to enlist in the campaign. The manager greeted him cordially, but he was less interested in politics than in battlefield stories.

  “Hey, I went to see a building that’s in receivership,” he said. “I get there and as soon as I come up to the door, a guy with his hands tied behind him comes flying out the window. How about that?”

  This precipitated a whole series of guys-falling-out-of-windows anecdotes, each gruesome, each told with the special relish that white Detroiters use when they deplore their city’s violence. “You know, the place looks worse to me than ever,” said the manager. “I personally think that anyone who stays in Detroit willingly is a real asshole.”

  “I’m gonna turn things around,” said Costa.

  His friend regarded him with good-natured skepticism. “They’ve been saying that it’s gonna turn around for twenty years, Chuck,” he said. “No offense, but if God performed a miracle, could you think of anything He could do to save this city?

  The Young camp was not particularly disturbed by the Costa challenge (when I mentioned Costa to Bob Berg, he looked at me blankly and said, “Chuck who?”); to make the primary, he would have to get a majority of the white vote—and that was going to Tom Barrow.

  Barrow is a handsome, open-faced accountant of forty, with a neat mustache, an Ivy League wardrobe and a manner to match. In 1985, running as a complete unknown, he got about two thirds of the white vote. Whites liked him for two reasons: first, he wasn’t Coleman Young; and second, he was a modest, businesslike coalition builder who made it a point to reach out to them.

  Unfortunately for Barrow, these same qualities were interpreted by blacks as a lack of ethnic authenticity. In a city where blackness is equated with street-smart militance, he didn’t seem like the real thing. Over and over, Barrow, the cousin of folk hero Joe Louis, was reduced to claiming, “I’m just as black as the rest of ’em,” but no one believed him. “Coleman is hot black coffee,” a woman told me. “Barrow is decaffeinated.” In the election of 1985, Barrow got less than one third of the black vote.

  “He doesn’t even curse,” a reporter said of the challenger. “He thinks it’s a bad example for kids. He says he’s going to beat the heck out of Coleman. I’ll bet Big Daddy is just shaking in his boots.”

  In 1985, Young’s method of dealing with Barrow had been to ignore him; the mayor barely bothered to campaign. This ti
me, however, Barrow seemed more formidable, coming off his success in leading the fight against casino gambling. Polls showed him trailing the mayor by a relatively small margin. The 1985 run had given him name recognition and experience. He was also better organized, thanks to Geoffrey Garfield, a pudgy, bespectacled, black political consultant from New York who once worked with David Dinkins.

  Barrow’s 1989 strategy was simple. He would keep his white base and concentrate on making inroads in the black community. Barrow could not hope to compete with Young’s civil rights credentials or signifying street style, but he thought he could attract support from young black professionals and tap into the dissatisfactions of other middle-class voters who cared more about safe streets, good schools and clean neighborhoods than about the ideology of liberation.

  Nobody knew quite what Erma Henderson’s stategy was, and it didn’t matter much. Henderson, an ordained minister, was the president of the Detroit Common Council, a body with about as much influence as the Albanian parliament. Her power base was among elderly churchwomen, not enough to make her a serious threat. Henderson’s main contribution to the campaign was an uncharacteristically shrill attack on the mayor’s strategy, which she said was “the way Hitler came to power.” “Erma’s a fine lady,” a Young aide told me afterward. “She just got a little carried away.” After the primary, to show there were no hard feelings, the mayor named a city park after her.

  As the September contest neared, the smart money in Detroit was on Barrow to finish second—and second, again, in November. But then, in the end of July, John Conyers suddenly announced that he was in the running, and it was a whole new race.

  Conyers was just what the ABC people had been waiting for—a real contender. He had been in Congress since 1964, and his name was almost as well known as Young’s. He had solid civil rights credentials and a reputation for militance that matched the mayor’s. He also had a solid base of support in his west side district and access to money: his brother, Nathan, owns a Ford dealership that grossed $21 million in 1987.