For three days, city officials declined to publish Devil’s Night statistics; they wanted to wait until after Halloween and the end of what they called “the seventy-two-hour Devil’s Night period.” Young’s only comment was that the number of fires had been “about normal.” Off the record, the mayor’s people admitted that it might have risen slightly from the previous year’s 104.
That estimate was loudly disputed by the Firefighters Union, which also happened to be Barrow’s biggest financial supporter. Union officials claimed their men had fought 285 Devil’s Night fires—far more than in any of the previous four years, and almost as many as 1984’s all-time record of 297.
On the day after Halloween, Young finally called a news conference at the City-County Building. Dressed in a blue blazer and pink shirt, the mayor gave his version of what had happened. There had been 115 fires on Devil’s Night itself, he said—up slightly from the year before. But, for the overall three-day period, the number had declined. He pointed to a red-white-and-blue chart, which showed constant decreases for the “Devil’s Night period” since 1984. The mayor praised the community spirit of the thirty thousand patrol volunteers, saluted the city’s “outstanding effort” and then offered to answer questions.
The reporters sitting around the conference table seemed momentarily speechless. None of them knew exactly how many fires there had been, but they had been on the street on Devil’s Night, and they knew that it had been bad, certainly worse than the year before. They had come to the press conference expecting to hear a chastened mayor explain his failure; instead, he had declared victory.
The months of media bashing and personal attacks on journalists suddenly hung heavy over the crowded room. Young glowered at them, daring them to dispute his version of reality. Finally a reporter broke the silence. “Mr. Mayor, I don’t want to be critical, but …”
“Yeah, sure you don’t,” interrupted the mayor with heavy sarcasm. “None of you wants to be critical.”
For the next half hour, the mayor snapped and raged at the reporters. He answered their gentle queries with harsh denunciations, demanding to know if they dared to dispute his official figures, and then waiting for their docile “no sirs” before moving on. Despite the fact that at least twenty journalists were present, the silences between questions grew longer and longer.
Finally a TV correspondent in the back of the room spoke up.
“Mr. Mayor, what we really want to know is, well, did the number of fires actually go down this year or what?”
Young fixed him with an imperious stare. “What do you think?” he demanded. “You can see the chart.”
“Yes sir,” said the reporter. “But you’re the mayor, I want to know what you think.”
Young refused to be appeased. “You got a big opinion,” he said. “I hear it on television every night. Let’s hear what you think.” The reporter reddened like a schoolboy and said nothing. “Next question,” snapped the mayor.
At the end of the press conference, the journalists filed quietly out of the room. They had been intimidated and they knew it. I was standing in the hall with Bill McGraw of the Free Press when a young black radio reporter came over and introduced himself. “That was a good question you asked in there,” McGraw told him in an encouraging tone.
“I had another question,” said the radio man. “I wanted more sound. But when I talk to the Man, I walk on coals. Maybe when I get bigger, y’know?”
Young’s performance had won him a partial victory. The next day the press would report two sets of figures—his and the Firefighters Union’s—without being able to say which was correct. Now he had to find a way to make voters give him the benefit of the doubt.
That evening, Young attended a fund-raiser sponsored by the Black Firefighters organization. The affair was held in an elegant nightclub just inside the Eight Mile border. Soul Muzak played softly in the background and civil servants in their Sunday clothes lined up for a free buffet supper. These were the mayor’s people, beneficiaries of his affirmative action policies, and they were in a receptive mood.
Young began his remarks with a general overview of his accomplishments, among which he included the construction of town houses on the Detroit River. “You can drive into your garage, walk through the house and out the back door, get into your boat and float over to the marina,” he said. He was reminding them of their prosperity—and its source. Before Coleman Young, blacks in Detroit didn’t have boats—or jobs as fire fighters.
Then the mayor turned to the main business of the night, an attack on the lily-white leadership” of the Firefighters Union. “They oppose affirmative action,” he said, “and so does my opponent. My opponent supports that damn union. Now, that’s some kind of an uncle.… And he’s got the right first name for it, too.” The room burst into laughter and applause. Young joined them, shoulders shaking. “Back home they call that signifyin’,” he said.
And so, Devil’s Night was Colemanized. It had taken one day for him to turn the “vision from hell” into a racial confrontation, with the bigoted white fire fighters and Uncle Tom Barrow on one side and the signifying leader of the black polis on the other. Barrow didn’t even mention the conflagration during the last week of the campaign.
On the Sunday before the election, Coleman Young staged his final rally, at the New St. Paul’s Tabernacle. The street outside the large church was festooned with triangular red-and-white Young ’89 signs. Dozens of city employees loitered in front of the building, talking politics and sniffing the aroma of fried chicken that wafted over from the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the corner. From time to time a Barrow car cruised by, and the Colemanites hooted good-naturedly.
When I arrived, notebook in hand, some of them mistook me for a local newsman. “Quit tellin’ people what to think,” they shouted. “We’re gonna have the last laugh!” They weren’t able to put any real hostility in it though; they could parrot their boss’s phrases, but not his rage.
Inside, a large crowd filled the pews of the blue-carpeted sanctuary. As usual, virtually everyone was black; throughout the campaign, the mayor almost never appeared before a predominantly white audience. Special roped-off areas were reserved for “Clergy” and “Elected Officials.” There was no press section. I took a seat in the rear of the church, next to a Free Press reporter.
There was none of the rowdy energy normally associated with a political rally. Men and women sat in dignified silence, waiting for the mayor and Jesse Jackson, who was also scheduled to speak. Church ushers escorted latecomers to seats. An organ played quietly in the background.
A group of dignitaries, led by Pastor Charles Butler, came to the pulpit, and began to warm up the crowd. UAW vice-president Ernie Lofton delivered an impassioned attack on the press: “We have two papers in this town that can’t tell fact from fiction,” he hollered. “We remember what Detroit was like prior to Coleman Young and we didn’t like what we saw.” When he finished, the crowd gave the union official a warm hand. “Seems like Brother Lofton came here to preach today,” said Reverend Butler, getting an appreciative chuckle.
More brief remarks followed. An activitist from Operation Get-Down seconded the attack on the press. “We don’t listen to any local media and we don’t listen to any national media, either,” he said. Tom Turner of the AFL-CIO was the only speaker to even allude to Barrow. “I don’t recall Coleman’s opponent ever paying any dues,” he told them. The attack on Barrow got much less applause than the press-bashing.
The choir sang “Victory Shall Be Mine,” and the crowd, more like a congregation, swayed and clapped. Then Young and Jackson took the pulpit, accompanied by Aretha Franklin, dressed for church in a modest black brocade suit and white pearls. There was an excited buzzing in the audience—they hadn’t known that she was on the show.
Reverend Butler introduced the mayor in three words: “Behold the man.” The crowd rose and cheered as Young, dressed as usual in an elegant double-breasted suit, came to the rostrum.
His remarks were short and surprisingly low-key. He talked briefly about his accomplishments, praised the church as a pillar of the community and called for racial harmony. “There are some who have mistaken African-American unity as antiwhite,” he said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” The proverbial visitor from Mars, landing at New St. Paul’s Tabernacle that afternoon, would have thought Coleman A. Young a conciliatory, statesmanlike old man with a very good tailor.
Then Aretha Franklin sang “Precious Lord,” the same song she sang at Martin Luther King’s funeral. She was a little hoarse in the beginning, but her voice returned as she went along, and as she soared to the end, the Free Press man turned to me. Like the other reporters on the campaign trail, he had come in for a fair share of personal abuse. Now he had a beatific smile on his face. “Covering politics in Detroit has its compensations,” he said.
Jesse Jackson delivered the finale. He is to black political oratory what Franklin is to gospel music—an inspired, inspiring virtuoso—and he was at the top of his form that afternoon. “I’m here today for an emancipation rally,” he intoned. “The blood of Malcolm and Martin brings us to an emancipation rally. When they were needed, they were there. And when the roll was called, Coleman Young was there. He answered ‘Present.’ ”
Skillfully, Jackson contrasted the mayor’s long, distinguished civil rights record with that of his yuppie opponent. He talked about Young’s defiance of Jim Crow regulations in the army, of his battle with the House Un-American Activities Committee, of his dedication to black causes. “The most effective affirmative action policy for jobs and contracts in America is right here in Detroit, Michigan,” he said.
Then Jackson turned his rhetorical guns on Barrow. “They say he knows how to get along with white folks,” he thundered contemptuously. “Well, that’s no great accomplishment. That’s no special skill. African-Americans have always known how to get along with white people. We learned how to get along with white people during slavery. The time has come for white people to learn to get along with us.” The church rocked with applause and cheers.
Finally Jackson and the others held hands and led the audience in “We Shall Overcome.” For a moment it was 1963, and Aretha’s father, C. L. Franklin, was leading Martin Luther King up Woodward Avenue at the head of a giant crowd. Back then, no one could have imagined the Detroit of today. In that sense, they had overcome; self-determination was a fact of life. But there were other facts, too. Dr. King had been murdered by a racist, and Reverend Franklin by a criminal—victims of the polarities of black suffering. In 1989, no one was certain anymore who the real enemy was—them, or us.
No one, that is, but Coleman Young. He had built a black city-state in the heart of the American middle west, given his people a government that spoke their language, streets and parks named for their heroes, city jobs and contracts and more political control than blacks have ever had, anywhere, in North America. He had, more than any politician in the country, created a city in his own image.
The irony was that he, better than anyone, knew the terrible limitations of his achievement. The price of black control had been abandonment and antipathy. White people had taken their businesses and factories and fled; the motherfuckers had stolen the city’s boots along with its bootstraps. It was this certainty—that the hostility of the white press, the white suburbs and, by extension, white America was ultimately responsible for the plight of his city and his people—that enabled the most powerful man in Detroit to hold Aretha Franklin’s hand and, in a wobbly, off-key voice, to sing, with sincere defiance, “We Shall Overcome.”
They sang “We Shall Overcome” at Tom Barrow’s final rally, too, but with a different accent and a different meaning.
The rally, held on the eve of the election, began at Barrow’s headquarters. Clusters of black-and-white balloons hung from the ceiling, and clusters of black-and-white supporters waited for the candidate’s towering brother, Shorty, to form them into a line for the candlelight march up Woodward Avenue. One wall was dominated by a large placard: “God Bless America, Land of Opportunity.”
Shorty, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Joe Louis, called “Hey-yo, hey-yo” and began herding the marchers to the door, where each was given a lit candle. Barrow, dressed in an open-collared striped shirt, blue blazer and gray slacks, led the procession. At his side was Reverend William Quick, the white pastor of the largely white Metropolitan United Methodist Church, where the rally was to take place.
Quick and Barrow marched four blocks up Woodward Avenue to the church, past vacant lots and boarded-up pawnshops. They sang as they went, “This little light of mine, I’m gonna make it shine,” but there was no one to hear them; at 6:30 P.M., the sidewalks of Detroit’s main street were deserted, and only a trickle of cars drove past.
The procession wound past the apartment building of the black grandmother who had been propositioned by Floyd at my cocktail party, almost a year before. Once, driving by Metropolitan United, she had pointed out the church, an imposing building that dominates a city block. “Every Sunday I see those white folks coming in from the suburbs to go to church,” she said. “They come to thank God—they thank Him that they don’t have to live next to niggers.”
The Barrow crowd was thin enough to fit into the church’s small sanctuary without filling up the balcony. Naturally, the rally began with a prayer, and then a middle-aged white woman in a white dress and thick glasses sang “Be Not Afraid” in a Joan Baez-like soprano, accompanied by an elderly white woman on the organ.
Reverend Quick kicked off the speeches with a rousing denunciation of Coleman Young and all his works. The litany of sins included buying off Quick’s fellow divines. “Millions of dollars have gone to the churches,” he declaimed. “Whatever happened to the separation of church and state?” The whites applauded but many of the blacks looked quizzical; they were mad at Coleman, after all, not at Jesus.
Quick was followed by another white minister, and then a black woman. “When the wicked are removed, the people rejoice,” she quoted, bursting into tears. A collective “Aw” rose from the pews, and Barrow, on his way to the podium, hugged her.
Barrow’s text that night was his usual message of responsibility and racial cooperation. “We’re sick of crime, crack, hate and racism,” he told the audience. “We’re not going to blame the white folks. Nobody is going to save us from us but us …”
As he talked, several reporters in the balcony began to compare notes on the campaign. Judging by the rally, it seemed to me that Barrow had failed to galvanize much black support—the key to his strategy. But the others dissented. “Barrow says that he’s only three points back,” said a usually well-informed journalist. “He’s got a poll, and I believe it. There’s a hell of a lot of dissatisfaction out there.” He took out a piece of paper and wrote “Coleman 51%, Barrow 49%.” “And it could go the other way,” he said.
“… In order for Detroit to come back, we’ve got to bring the community back together,” yelled Barrow, coming to a close. “It’s time to stop thinking about black and white, city and suburbs. We’ve got to work together. United, we can make this a great city again.”
Reverend Quick came forward and held the candidate’s hand high in the air. The two men began to sing “We Shall Overcome” in a flat tone. The Barrow partisans joined in—“Black and white together, black and white to-ge-he-ther,” they sang, swaying gently in the pews. “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”
There was little doubt what the crowd had in mind; they intended to overcome Coleman Young, to liberate his liberated city, seize it from the forces of black self-determination and return it to America. Dr. King’s heir, Jesse Jackson, had been with Young at New St. Paul’s but his disciples, believers in assimilation and integration, were with the yuppie accountant at Metropolitan United Methodist.
Thus did the campaign of 1989 come to a close. Nominally it was a race for mayor of America’s sixth largest city, but
there was much more at stake than who would occupy the Manoogian mansion for the next four years. There had been talk about housing and education, crime and clean streets, but despite Barrow’s best efforts, the city’s quality of life was never the main issue. The election was really about the black state of mind in a place where blacks are free to express themselves without worrying about white people.
The campaign posed serious ideological questions that went far beyond the specifics of Detroit. What is the root cause of the desperate condition of African-America—black irresponsibility or white racism? What is the best way for African-Americans to progress—self-rule or a junior partnership with whites? Is defiant struggle merely an evolutionary step toward inclusion in the broader American polity—or is it, in the words of Ronald Hewitt, the best that blacks can hope for in the United States? In a very real sense, the election in Detroit was a referendum on the contemporary black interpretation of reality.
On election day, the voters of America’s African-American capital returned their verdict, and it wasn’t even close. Coleman Young was reelected by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent, with almost 70 percent of the black vote (and only 13 percent of the whites). Detroit, the city with the country’s highest rate of teenage murder, unemployment and depopulation, twelve thousand abandoned homes, a Third World infant mortality rate and an epidemic drug problem, had spoken: Four More Years.
That night, the citizens of the black polis came together to celebrate the fifth consecutive victory of Coleman Alexander Young. Several thousand people packed Cobo Hall, the convention center on the river—executives with gleaming, gold-rimmed glasses and thousand-dollar suits and street people in jeans and torn sweaters; churchwomen wearing crosses large enough to frighten vampires and stylish ladies in ball gowns and glittering jewelry; aging auto workers sporting UAW jackets and young Muslims dressed in white robes and skullcaps. The mayor’s rainbow coalition ranged from coal black to light tan—there weren’t more than a couple of dozen whites at the celebration.
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